Pakistan’s Educational System and Violence: Is There a Connection?

Christopher Candland, Political Science, Wellesley College

Research Grant, 2004, 2005

---

Purpose
The goal of the research was to investigate the claim that a madaris [Islamic boarding school] education in Pakistan promotes justifications for violence.

Method
The method of inquiry involved extensive interviews with madaris and non-madaris educators in 2005 and a survey of 220 Pakistani students in 2006. The students, ranging in ages from sixteen to twenty-two, attended madaris, private, and government schools in Karachi and its environs. The survey consisted of seventy-three questions, many of them open-ended. Questions related to students’ biographies and families; curriculum and school attendance; sources of news; knowledge of Islam, Pakistani history, United States politics, and international relations; the nature of violence; and judgments about justice and injustice, including justifications for violence. The survey rendered more than sixteen thousand pieces of data on thirty schools.

Findings
Analysis of the survey results found that madaris students are not more likely to indicate approval of violence to address perceived injustices.

Students in government schools were slightly more likely than madaris students to advocate violence to address perceived injustices in family, local, national, regional, and international affairs. Students in private schools were slightly less likely to approve of violence to address such perceived injustices. The exception to this trend was with respect to Indian-administered/occupied Kashmir. Madaris students were more likely than government and private school students to approve of violence.

Analysis of the survey results found that madaris students are not more likely to indicate approval of violence to address perceived injustices.

Madaris students were also more likely to question the professed purpose of the survey and to be provocative in their answers (e.g., Question: What is justice? Answer: Whatever George Bush says it is.)

Related research
Researchers on madaris education in Pakistan might benefit from noting that the distinction between madaris, government, and private schools can be misleading. Government schools do provide a religious education.

Islamiyat is a mandatory subject in government schools. Further, some religious political parties operate low-cost or free-of-cost private schools that follow the national (government) curriculum and use government-approved textbooks but are designed to inculcate in students the ideology of their political party. Thus, the conclusion, drawn from other research, that parents who send one child to a madaris and another to private school are not religiously inclined in their school choices might be mistaken. Also, Pakistanis regard “school” (iskool) as a western educational institution. Thus, if people are asked about the schools that they attend or have attended, they will not consider a madrasa as a possible response. This would explain why some surveys of schooling in Pakistan have suggested that madrasa enrollment rates (as a percentage of the school-going population) are far smaller (about 1 percent) than previously thought (about 30 percent). Those surveys ask people about schools they have attended, not about madaris. Researchers are well advised to be critical of using western curricular assumptions in designing educational research projects for Pakistan.

Bibliography

1. http://www.candland.info/MadarisReform.pdf

Violence and Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Comparative Study of Kingston, Jamaica

Enrique D. Arias, Political Science, City University of New York, John Jay College

Research Grant, 2009

---

This project seeks to understand the political role of armed groups in Kingston, Jamaica. Scholarship on gangs in Jamaica indicates that over the past thirty years criminal groups in that city, which were founded with the support of the country’s two main political parties in the 1960s and 1970s, have become increasingly less political. My findings support this general observation but also suggest that there is a wide variation in the political posture of criminal organizations in Kingston. What accounts for these differences?

Large swaths of the city’s working-class neighborhoods are dominated by politically connected actors that engage in extortion as well drugs and arms trafficking. The core of impoverished areas close to the downtown business district and other older impoverished areas in the southern and southwestern part of the city are often organized as what some refer to as garrison communities in which a single gang dominates an entire neighborhood or parliamentary constituency. Other impoverished regions, often newer settlements or areas that have fallen into poverty over the last 30 or 40 years, have high levels of criminal activity but are subject to a looser form of gang dominance in which smaller, but no less violent, gangs control different streets and compete with each other. Despite this conflict, these smaller gangs, as a result of shared political affiliations, will often work together during elections to protect the neighborhood from outside armed groups.

The project consisted of approximately 100 open-ended qualitative interviews conducted with leaders of different working-class communities in the city as well as members of civic organizations and policymakers and approximately 400 residents of two communities dominated by different types of armed gangs. One of these neighborhoods is located in the Kingston Western Constituency, next to the historic downtown commercial area, and the other is located in eastern Kingston in the Mountain View Road area, a region characterized by impoverished formerly middle-class housing developments. From the 1960s until mid-2010, a powerful hierarchical gang controlled much of the Kingston Western Constituency. The portion of the Mountain View Road area I studied is led by a set of decentralized gangs that negotiate local control and fight amongst themselves. The armed groups that operate in the two areas are both active supporters of the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), one of the two dominant parties in the country. Where many consider western Kingston a key stronghold for the JLP’s armed wing for the entire country, the JLP-controlled neighborhoods on Mountain View Road are a key component of the JLP’s armed operation in eastern Kingston. A close analysis of the two areas, however, suggests that that the armed group in western Kingston maintains a much stronger link to the JLP and, despite the fact that the JLP has won every election in the Kingston Western Constituency since independence in 1962, plays a very active role in the voting process, attacking residents who refuse to turn out for elections. The armed actors on Mountain View Road, on the other hand, display comparatively less interest in actual voter turnout despite the fact that that the constituencies in that region have been the site of considerable electoral contestation over the past two decades.

Evidence gathered suggests that what drives gang-led political violence in the two areas is not the historic question of party affiliation but the criminal dynamics and interests affecting each area and the role that connections to the state play in those armed projects.

Evidence gathered suggests that what drives gang-led political violence in the two areas is not the historic question of party affiliation but the criminal dynamics and interests affecting each area and the role that connections to the state play in those armed projects. The gang that controlled Kingston Western was involved in a multifaceted criminal enterprise focused on international arms and narcotics trafficking, mass extortion of downtown businesses, and obtaining government contracts and patronage. The leadership of the gang depended on close connections with the government for protection from law enforcement and access to contracts. Thus, while the electoral outcome in the area was always a given, the leadership of the gang sought to boost turnout in its efforts to display its power and efficacy to party leadership. The result is a criminal enterprise that trades on political connections and, thus, at times acts as a political gang. The gangs in eastern Kingston, however, are involved in much more limited extortion activities and they receive comparatively little in the way of government contracts. The gangs make most of their money on the international and local retail arms and drug trade that is articulated through corrupt police. Thus, while party contacts may be important in providing some protection against arrest, they are much less important to these gangs than to their counterparts in the west. The result is a set of gangs with a political identity and connections that has less interest in taking actions to bolster those connections or directly profit from them.

This project is part of a larger three city, six neighborhood, study that examines similar processes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Medellin, Colombia. The project as a whole examines the role of armed actors in providing security as well as their involvement in elections and policy making.

By Right of War: The Discipline and Practice of International Law in Imperial Russia, 1868–1917

Peter Holquist, History, University of Pennsylvania

Research Grant, 2008

---

This project addresses the emergence and consolidation of the international law of war. The intellectual lineage for the law of war dates back at least to Hugo Grotius (1583–1645). But it was only from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century that the law of war as we know it today, such as the criteria for distinguishing “legal combatants” from “illegal combatants,” crystallized. My study traces the historical foundations of this international legal order and tests the methodological presumptions about its origin and functioning.

As historians and legal scholars have demonstrated, international law of war (now often termed “international humanitarian law”) took form and was codified in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It emerged from a series of conferences and agreements, most notably the 1874 Brussels Conference on Proposed Rules for Military Warfare and the two Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. In this period, the Russian empire played a preeminent role in codifying and extending the international law of war. By way of illustration, the Russian government in 1868 introduced the rationalization that it was the “laws of humanity” that justified the laws of war in the St. Petersburg Declaration banning explosive bullets. It was the Russian government that convened, and drafted the preparatory materials for, both the 1874 Brussels Conference and the 1899 Hague Conference, gatherings which hammered out the key principles of what became the “laws and customs of war.” And the first international use of the term “crimes against humanity” in a penal sense came in 1915, in an Allied note to the Ottoman Empire regarding the Armenian genocide; the Russian government was responsible for inserting that phrase. The concepts developed at that time, and which the Russian empire played a key role in crafting, continue to serve as the framework for international humanitarian law today.

The project, in other words, asks by what means, and to what degree, can one bring people's conduct, even in extremis, into line with normative and ethical prescriptions.

We are left, though, with a dilemma: Why did officials of the Russian empire, famously ungoverned by the rule of law at home, insistently press the case that all states, the Russian empire included, be brought under an emerging system of codified international law? My study encompasses two distinct areas of analysis. First, it traces how international law emerged as a discipline in Imperial Russia and came to flourish there. This is a story of intellectual and diplomatic history. The second half of the project measures the extent to which these normative principles shaped actual policy. It takes the form of military and political history, examining the Russian army in three cases of military occupation: Bulgaria and Anatolia in 1877–78; Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion, 1900–1901; and Galicia and Armenia during the First World War. The project, in other words, asks by what means, and to what degree, can one bring people’s conduct, even in extremis, into line with normative and ethical prescriptions.

Bibliography

1. Holquist, Peter. "Forms of Violence during the Russian Occupation of Ottoman Territory and in Northern Persia (Urmia and Astrabad), October 1914-December 1917," in Borderlands, eds. Eric Weitz and Omer Bartov (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011).

2. Holquist, Peter. "The Politics and Practice of the Russian Occupation of Armenia, 1915- Feb. 1917," in A Question of Genocide, 1915: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Gocek, and Norman Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 151-74.

3. Holquist, Peter. "In accord with State Interests and the People's Wishes: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia's Resettlement Administration," Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 151-79.

4. Holquist, Peter. "The Role of Personality in the First (1914-1915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina" in John Klier, ed., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in European History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 52-73.

Irish Religious Demography and Conflict, 1659–1926

Kerby A. Miller, History, University of Missouri

Research Grant, 2006

---

The goal of this project was to collect and analyze historical data (official and unofficial) on the numbers of Irish Catholics and Protestants (the latter divided between Anglicans and Dissenters), who inhabited Ireland’s various administrative and census districts (townlands, parishes, baronies, counties, and provinces), to better understand how and why their geographical and demographic relationships changed between the mid-17th and early 20th centuries. My collaborators—Professor Liam Kennedy of the Queen’s University of Belfast and Dr. Brian Gurrin of the National University of Ireland at Maynooth—and I have found that:

(1) The demographic experiences of the Anglicans and Presbyterians in Ulster, Ireland’s only northern province (most of which now comprises Northern Ireland) were significantly and often dramatically different, at least from the early 1700s through the 1880s. In various, fundamental ways, these findings challenge the notion that Irish history is the story of only two [different and antagonistic] traditions—one homogenously Protestant, the other Catholic—particularly since the Ulster Presbyterian experiences of mass emigration (and even susceptibility to the Great Famine of 1845–52) often appear to be much more similar to those of Ireland’s Catholics than to those of the members of the Church of Ireland (the island’s legally established religion until 1869).

These findings challenge the notion that Irish history is the story of only two [different and antagonistic] traditions—one homogenously Protestant, the other Catholic.

(2) the demographic data from Ireland’s three southern provinces (Leinster, Munster, and Connacht) indicate that the proportional and even the absolute sizes of their Protestant populations (overwhelmingly Anglican) declined in the mid-18th century. These findings challenge the argument that the decline of the southern Irish Protestant population was related directly to the rise of Irish Catholic nationalism, which was not pronounced until the early 19th century.

Because of its immense size and complexity, this is an ongoing project. Only a small proportion of our findings have been published to date (March, 2011). However, one book and several major articles are now in progress; and we anticipate many more to follow.

Criminal Retaliation: A Qualitative Study of Social Control Beyond the Law

Bruce A. Jacobs, Criminology, University of Missouri, St. Louis

Research Grant, 2003

---

Despite its preeminent role in regulating disputes between and among street criminals, retaliation has received scant attention from criminological researchers. Existing studies explore retaliation only tangentially, with little or no consideration of its situational and contextual dynamics. Even when retaliation is examined in its own right, the circumstances in which payback is enacted typically receive less attention than the factors that mediate the availability of law. As a result, the structure, process, and forms of retaliation in the real world setting of urban American street crime remain poorly understood. This study explores the face of modern day retaliation from the perspective of currently active criminals who have experienced it first-hand, as offenders, victims, or both. The study explores the retaliatory ethic among street criminals and the vocabularies of motive that offenders adopt to justify its role as the preferred mode of extralegal social control. It also examines the structure, process, and contingent forms of retaliation, offering a typology to organize the data. Part of this examination is the ways in which gender shapes the context and dynamics of retaliatory events for both male and female street criminals. The study also investigates the phenomenon of imperfect retaliation—acts of reprisal committed against parties not responsible for the instigating affront. The reasons for imperfect retaliation and their implications for crime displacement beyond the law are specifically explored.

Qualitative analysis revealed the importance of two axial factors around which retaliatory strikes could best be understood: whether such strikes occur immediately after the affront, and whether the strikes involve face-to-face contact with the person responsible for the affront.

Qualitative analysis revealed the importance of two axial factors around which retaliatory strikes could best be understood: whether such strikes occur immediately after the affront, and whether the strikes involve face-to-face contact with the person responsible for the affront. Immediate reprisal that involves face-to-face contact was called reflexive retaliation. Immediate reprisal that involves no face-to-face contact was called reflexively displaced retaliation. When retaliation is delayed, an added contingency appears—whether or not the delay is desired by the retaliating party. This permits four additional possibilities. Face-to-face retaliation where the delay is desired was called calculated retaliation. Face-to-face retaliation where the delay is not desired was called deferred retaliation. Retaliation without face-to-face contact where the delay is desired was called sneaky retaliation. Retaliation without face-to-face contact with the violator where the delay was undesired by the retaliating party is called imperfect retaliation.

Ethnic Identity, Collective Action and Conflict: An Experimental Approach

Macartan Humphreys, Political Science, Harvard University

Research Grant, 2003

---

A large literature shows that ethnically homogenous communities often do a better job than diverse communities of producing satisfactory schools and health care, adequate sanitation, low levels of crime, and other essential outcomes that depend on community-wide cooperation. This project seeks to find out why. The research indicates that the principal obstacle to cooperation in diverse groups is not ethnic favoritism or a lack of consensus on what should be done but rather the stronger expectations of reciprocity that exist within than across ethnic communities. The results offer important lessons for policymakers committed to improving the welfare of people living in diverse communities.

The study was conducted in a neighborhood of Kampala, Uganda, that has both high levels of diversity and low levels of public goods provision. The researchers used behavioral games to explore how the ethnicity of the person with whom one is interacting shapes social behavior. Hundreds of local participants interacted with various partners in strategic games involving the allocation of money and the completion of joint tasks. Each game was designed to capture a different channel through which ethnic diversity might affect social cooperation. Many of the subsequent findings debunk long-standing explanations for diversity’s adverse effects.

When given the opportunity to act altruistically in an anonymous fashion, individuals did not choose to benefit coethnics disproportionately. Yet when anonymity was removed, subjects behaved very differently.

Contrary to the prevalent notion that shared preferences facilitate collective action within ethnic groups, differences in goals and priorities among participants were not found to be structured along ethnic lines. Nor was there evidence that subjects favored the welfare of their coethnics over that of non-coethnics. When given the opportunity to act altruistically in an anonymous fashion, individuals did not choose to benefit coethnics disproportionately. Yet when anonymity was removed, subjects behaved very differently. With their actions publicly observed, subjects gave significantly more to coethnics, expected their partners to reciprocate, and expected that they would be sanctioned for a failure to cooperate. This effect was most pronounced among individuals who were otherwise least likely to cooperate.

These results suggest that what may look like ethnic favoritism is, in fact, a set of reciprocity norms—stronger among coethnics than among non-coethnics—that make it possible for members of more homogeneous communities to take risks, invest, and cooperate without the fear of getting cheated. Such norms may be more subject to change than deeply held ethnic antipathies—a powerful finding for policymakers seeking to design social institutions and promote development in diverse societies.

Bibliography

1. Humphreys, Macartan. Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (with J Habyarimana, D Posner, and J Weinstein). New York: Russell Sage Press, 2009.

Violence Against Women and Social Changes in Postcommunist Societies

Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic, Sociology, Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research, Belgrade

Research Grant, 2000

---

The main aim of the survey was to examine the ways in which social changes in postcommunist and war-affected societies influence the vulnerability of women to violence (domestic violence and sex trafficking). Having in mind that preliminary findings suggested the hypothesis that the impact of social changes on women’s vulnerability to violence is mediated by changes in the everyday life of both women and men, the subject of research was determined as an examination of the impact of social changes on changes in everyday life of women and men as well as the impact of the latter on women’s vulnerability to violence. Also, the impact of social changes, primarily the impact of the creation of civil society and the women’s movement, on the attitudes of both citizens and the state toward the problem of violence against women is examined. Comparison of data for four countries (Serbia, Hungary, Macedonia, and Bulgaria) allowed me to learn about similarities and differences in the impact of social changes on everyday life and violence against women. The comparative research of these processes in countries which belonged to different models of communism, which were on different levels of economic development and which—because of these differences and some additional influences, such as war and inter-ethnic conflicts—achieved different levels of macro social change, allowed me a deeper examination of the nature of realized changes and, at least at an analytical level, differentiation between the impact of war and social transition on everyday life and violence against women.

The focus of my analysis is on the changes and transitions in the life of adults in postcommunist society, including both changes in comparison with life during communism and different changes that occurred over the last ten years. Looking at the biographical and subjective perceptual processes of individual women and men, based on the use of intergenerational and historical dimensions, I analyze them in relation to broader structural changes in their countries. I explore in particular the dynamic relations between the individual women and men and other members of the family and household, and relations between the household and the changing economy within the wider society. The impact of socioeconomic and war-related changes on family structure, gender identities, relationships and violence against women is the focus of my analysis. I assume that a comprehensive understanding of the causes and consequences of violence requires that it be placed within the context in which it occurs and that it be examined from the perspective of both women and men. Forty-five women’s group activists, judges, lawyers, social workers, researchers, professors, psychiatrists and psychologists, as well as ninety-eight persons (thirty-six men and sixty-two women) were interviewed during 1999 about the influence of social changes to their everyday life and women’s vulnerability to violence.

Structural violence contributes to gendered interpersonal violence both by causing it and by preventing society and victims from confronting it effectively. 

My survey findings showed that global economic and political changes and war produce micro level changes, i.e., changes in everyday life and gender, generational, and ethnic structures/identities. Privatization and a market economy led to the development of both a traditional gender ideology and retraditionalization of gender structures. War, militarism, dissatisfaction with the quasi equality of women and men, emasculation of men, and “masculinization” of women during communism as well as antifeminism contributed as well. Moreover, “capitalism generates massive inequalities in the social structure” (Mooney, 2000, 216) and privatizes family and women’s secondary status within it, which, as observed by Schechter (1982, 225), is dangerous “because it allows violence to accelerate while everyone says ‘Mind your own business. This is a family problem.’ ” Moreover, a market economy also limits women’s body to a sexual object and marketable good. Thus, patriarchy, structural violence brought by capitalism, and macro violence may be considered the main macro structural factors which affect women’s vulnerability to violence.

Both a high level of structural violence and few resources for social programs result in a large part of the population in postcommunist and war-affected societies being vulnerable to interpersonal violence—as victims but also as perpetrators. Structural violence contributes to gendered interpersonal violence both by causing it and by preventing society and victims from confronting it effectively. Therefore, it is not surprising that, in spite of all the positive political changes, and despite the efforts made by civil society and women’s movements, not much has changed in terms of legal and institutional reforms regarding violence against women in postcommunist countries. A close connection between the welfare state and a decrease of both shaming and violence is obvious. The problem is, however, that, because of the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism, the welfare state is presently difficult to build even in developed countries, let alone in developing ones.

Bibliography

1. Nikolic-Ristanovic, V. Social change, gender and violence: post communist and war affected societies. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

Scrutinizing the Gray Zones: Dynamics of Collective Violence in Contemporary Argentina

Javier Auyero, Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Research Grant, 2005

---

Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during week-long food riots in Argentina in December 2001. Thirty-four people were reported dead and hundreds injured. Among the looting crowds, activists from the Peronist party (the main political party in the country) were quite prominent. During the lootings, police officers were conspicuously absent—particularly when small stores were sacked. Through a combination of archival research, statistical analysis, and multisited fieldwork, and taking heed of the perspective of contentious politics, this work provides the first available analytic description of the origins, course, meanings, and outcomes of the December 2001 wave of lootings in Argentina. The research scrutinizes the gray zone where the actions and networks of both party activists and law enforcement officials meet and mesh. The research, furthermore, makes a case for the study of the gray zone in less spectacular, but equally relevant, forms of political activity. Clandestine connections between established political actors, I argue, count in the making of collective violence and in routine political life.

The research scrutinizes the gray zone where the actions and networks of both party activists and law enforcement officials meet and mesh.

Bibliography

1. Auyero, Javier. "L'Espace des luttes." Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 160 (2006): 122-132.

2. Auyero, Javier. Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

3. Auyero, Javier. "The Political Makings of the 2001 Lootings in Argentina." Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006): 1-25.

The South Carolina Murder Project

Douglas Eckberg, Sociology and Anthropology, Winthrop University

Research Grant, 2005

---

Though the American South is known historically to have experienced high rates of homicide, little systematic, quantitative information on southern homicide history is actually available. Most quantitative research on the topic before the twentieth century deals with major cities, mainly in the North, leading to four biases in the picture of U.S. killing: (1) a regional bias, focusing on the belt from northern Illinois to New England; (2) an urban bias; (3) a racial bias, as most African Americans lived in the South in the nineteenth century and those living in the North are likely to have had unique social characteristics; and (4) a social bias, based on the North’s experience of industrialization and immigration versus the South’s agrarian economy, caste-like ethnic relationships, poverty, illiteracy, and lack of infrastructure.

This project addresses these biases by developing a victim-based violence data series for South Carolina, extending from the end of Reconstruction through 1920. The sources of information are county criminal records, primarily in the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, and the daily newspapers of Charleston and Columbia. The data series includes homicides, suicides, and suspicious accidental deaths, including such at-the-time common deaths as accidental child burnings. Because homicide is an assault in which a victim dies, the project has added a component: basic information on all serious assaults (assault and battery with intent to kill, assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated assault, etc.).

An innovation of the project is the use of a digital camera to record jpg images of all important documents: arrest and indictment forms, testimony, coroner’s records, and newspaper accounts. This provides a permanent, portable record of all original sources.

This project addresses these biases by developing a victim-based violence data series for South Carolina, extending from the end of Reconstruction through 1920.

The data series will include machine-readable numerical data (spreadsheets and plain-text files), researcher’s text notes, and the photographic record. It should be useful to both quantitative and qualitative researchers.

This will help fill in the full violence history of the U.S. It will allow tracing of social influences on southern killings in both industrialized and agricultural areas. It will allow examination of a general decrease in southern homicide as the nation entered the twentieth century. Finally, the data will allow examination of the development of the Black-White homicide “gap,” which appears to be substantially a twentieth-century phenomenon.

Early research from this project found no net racial differences in homicide rates in the first years after Reconstruction (rates were about 20 per 100,000 for each racial category), little interracial killing, and documentation that the state archives may lack records on over half the state’s killings. One recent phenomenon that has come to light is a high proportion of Charleston homicides for which formal antemortem (“death-bed”) statements were given. Almost none of those victims would have died with late twentieth-century trauma care, including: treatment for shock, emergency trauma surgery, and prophylactic antibiotics. The high homicide death rate of the time, then, overstates the amount of interpersonal violence, in comparison to the amount today, to an extent that is yet unknown.

The Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Community Life: A Comparative Field Study of the Transformative Impact of Sudan’s Unresolved War

Sharon E. Hutchinson, Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jok Madut Jok, History, Loyola Marymount

Research Grant, 1999

---

Our original research focused on the militarization of Nuer and Dinka community life, with special attention devoted to the role of ethnic conflict triggered off by the 1991 splitting of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The tremendous surge in Nuer/Dinka violence precipitated by that event mercifully came to an end in January 2002, after the SPLA was reunited by Dr. John Garang and Dr. Riek Machar. Inter-Nuer tensions, however, began to escalate after the SPLA’s reunification, with some of Riek Machar’s former allies turning against him, with the encouragement and military assistance of the government of Sudan. Oil exploration activities in Nuer and Dinka regions of the Western Upper Nile, moreover, continued to gain momentum, with an estimated 174,000 Nuer and Dinka civilians within the oil zone having lost their homes by early 2003. While US-monitored peace negotiations currently taking place between the government of Sudan and the SPLA are expected to yield a “framework peace agreement” in a matter of days or weeks, the potential for continuing North/South and South-on-South violence remains very high.

Inter-Nuer tensions, however, began to escalate after the SPLA's reunification, with some of Riek Machar's former allies turning against him, with the encouragement and military assistance of the government of Sudan.

We have continued to carry out fieldwork on evolving patterns of inter- and intra-ethnic violence in war-torn regions of the Western Upper Nile (a.k.a. Unity State), southern Sudan—including six months of intensive field research carried out between mid-December 2002 and mid-June 2003. Owing to some of the publications generated by my 1998–2000 field studies, carried out with your support, as well as to longstanding research association with southern Sudan and to my fluency in the Nuer language, some of my writings attracted the attention of several U.S. State Department officials. As a result, I was asked to serve as an official “monitor” on a newly created, US-led international team of observers—known as the “Civilian Protection Monitoring Team”—stationed in southern Sudan. The team’s formal mandate was broadly defined. Basically, the team was responsible for “investigating, confirming and reporting” on all attacks on “civilians or civilian property” carried out by the SPLA, the GOS or any of their allied militias. Since nearly all of the military attacks against southern Sudanese civilians that occurred during my term of service took place in Nuer regions of the oil-rich Western Upper Nile province, we played a prominent role in the collection of first-hand accounts of such attacks from civilians and military personnel involved on both sides of the conflict. Because no one else on our team spoke Nuer, we took responsibility for interviewing nearly all of the civilians, IDPs, local chiefs, POWs, government officials, militia leaders, regional commanders, and rank-and-file soldiers on the war front. After four months of service with the CPMT, we served an additional two months of service with USAID, carrying out more detailed investigations on displaced Nuer populations in the western and eastern Upper Nile.

Since September 2003, we have also been deeply involved in a major class action suit, raised under the Alien Tort Claims Act in a U.S. Federal Court, by current and former residents of southern Sudan, alleging that Talisman Energy, a Canadian oil company, collaborated with the Sudanese government in a policy of ethnically cleansing civilian populations to promote oil exploration activities. Thus far, we have developed a series of geographical and historical maps, documenting military attacks in the oil zone, tracking the successive movements of the displaced, identifying the placement of new government garrisons and, more generally, exposing the overall impact of continuing military violence on Nuer communities throughout the region. Drawing extensively on previously established contacts in the region as well on our translation skills, we have tried to ensure that cross-cultural communications run as smoothly as possible between an excellent team of American lawyers and the predominately nonliterate southern Sudanese plaintiffs represented in the case. We have also been developing educational materials in the Nuer language in the hope that a future peace accord will permit the reopening of schools in the region. In these ways, we have sought to transform the extensive field experience I have gained through our academic investigations over the past twenty-three years into something that will be able to better serve the immediate needs and aspirations of the communities we have studied.

Bibliography

1. Hutchinson, Sharon E. and Jok Madut Jok."Gendered Violence and the Militarization of Ethnicity: A Case Study from South Sudan." In Werbner, Richard (ed.). 2002. Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. New York & London: Zed Books. p. 84-108.

2. Hutchinson, Sharon E. 2001 "A Curse from God? Political and Religious Dimensions of the Post-1991 Rise of Ethnic Violence in South Sudan." Journal of Modern African Studies. 39 (2): 307-331.

3. Hutchinson, Sharon E. and Jok Madut Jok. 1999. "Sudan's Prolonged Second Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic Identities." African Studies Review 42 (2). p. 125-145.