Thomas Vladimir Brønd

By providing the conceptual framework for the contributions to this Special Issue, this article argues that impunity as an omnipresent reality in Iraq can be better understood through the twin concepts: impunity state and impunity politics. It defines impunity state as a sphere of radical security and exception from punishment, for which elite players strive, while creating insecurity for non-elite Iraqis. This state is sustained by impunity politics, i.e. the informal bargaining, negotiation, competition, and violence of elite actors to achieve and maintain impunity. The article draws on Walter Benjamin's ideas and recent advances in Critical Security Studies to show how impunity functions on a foundational level and destabilizes Eurocentric understandings of state and sovereignty in Iraq. It demonstrates how the US imposed impunity on Iraq after the invasion in the long 2003. Lastly, it highlights how each article contributes to central theme of this Special Issue.

This article focuses on overlooked revolutionary friendship as a primary vehicle of revolutionary politics. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork among revolutionaries of Syria’s peaceful protest movements. The article depicts how friendships emerge in revolutionary moments. It analyzes the experience of friendship as a primary locus for revolutionary politics and as part of social transformations, which often occur during war and revolutions. Drawing on the anthropology of friendship and social theory, I demonstrate how new zones of social gravity were created in beautiful friendships challenging the neo-liberalism and authoritarianism of Ba’athist regime and installing social change.

Events unfolding in Syria since 2011 have all too often been depicted too simply as a “sectarian war”. Against the backdrop of such accounts, this article investigates the lived revolutionary experience of Syrians active in the peaceful revolutionary movement and the local coordination committees. A more nuanced ethnographic approach to sectarianism, revolutionary action and war reveals how young revolutionaries re-negotiate family background and sectarian histories in the face of the regime’s sectarian enterprises and narratives. Anti-sectarian features of revolutionary action on the part of the peaceful movement not only counteract the narratives of the regime. It also offers a window into revolutionary subjectivity and ideology in Syria’s peaceful movement as part of broader social changes occurring in Syria in the context of devastating war and destruction.

This article deals with the ways in which Islam is put to use by the Syrian regime and its opposition in the Syrian Uprising. By applying anthropological theory about politics of immediation and political theory about ideologies to a specific case – namely bombings in Kafer Suseh in Damascus in December 2011 – the article illustrates how horrific images in the conflict are mediated as part of distinctive political projects. The article traces the work of anti-regime activists on the Internet and on TV as well as that of pro-regime representatives in order to understand the peculiar scapegoating processes that followed in the hours after the bombings. In effect, a certain dynamic of ideological mediation is proposed in which social, historical and political presuppositions are suppressed. Resurfacing the historical conditions of mediation gives a better understanding of how horrific events as the one in the case are mediated. On a fundamental level, the case and its analysis indicates how politics of immediation and ideology intertwine in battles over Islam and its future role in Syria.

I stedet for et abstract er her begyndelsen på indledningen:

Med lanceringen af den arabiske satellit TV-kanal al-Jazeera i 1996 og den første islamiske satellitkanal Iqra’ i 1998 samt internet og mobiltelefoner skabtes der arabiske offentligheder, hvor det på nye måder blev muligt for muslimer og arabere at kommunikere og interagere med hinanden på tværs af nationale grænser og ofte uden for regimernes agendaer. Over en lidt længere periode, siden 1970’erne, fandt forskellige former for islamisk vækkelse sted i den arabiske verden. Disse parallelle udviklinger – nye typer af medier, større mulighed for kommunikation og nye fortolkninger af islam – har været med til at ændre islamiske normer, udfordret politiske strategier og styrket nye og gamle identiteter i de arabiske lande. De over 700 nye arabiske og 47 islamiske satellitkanaler samt internet debatfora og sociale medier har spillet en væsentlig rolle i denne udvikling. (...)

Hvad vil det sige at være irakisk flygtning i Syrien? Gennem en række eksempler fra mit feltarbejde i 2008, vil jeg i denne artikel vise hvordan sammenhænge mellem fastlåshed og forhandling, flygtning og individ, mistillid og menneskerettigheder udgør en særlig kosmologi. Vi skal møde Tahir, en irakisk familiefar, og være med i praktik hos FN. En 'kosmologi' behøver ikke være religiøs eller magisk, sådan som ordet almindeligvis antyder. Det kan ikke desto mindre være et meget brugbart begreb til at forstå sammenhængen i måder at erfare og være til i verden på.