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.

As we have seen in Introduction by the editors, this volume is concerned with looking anew at contemporary military action or, in other words, the work of armed forces in theater. This epilogue argues for the vitality of this perspective by making fairly simple observations regarding both what is lacking in our existing knowledge and what is present and new in these collected chapters. The bottom line, which we might as well skip to now, concerns the special alchemy of the two words “mission” and “formation”. An interrogation of missions, rather than functions or ecologies, strikes me as enormously productive and is most compelling when coupled with an analytically open approach to “formations”.

The study of military action by behavioral scientists is usually constrained for reasons of difficulty getting access and doing the research on processes of action. The first part of this chapter explores several approaches to the study of combat formations. The second part presents empirical information based on the personal experiences of the author. It briefly covers four distinct case studies on the micro, meso and macro levels of operational activities. The first two case studies cover unintended formations during terror attacks; the third case study covers air–ground combat formations; the fourth case study covers ad hoc military–police formations during internal policing in the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. The chapter presents the knowledge, research design and a variety of methods that are required for the proper analysis of mission formations.

The study of military action by behavioral scientists is usually constrained for reasons of difficulty getting access and doing the research on processes of action. The first part of this chapter explores several approaches to the study of combat formations. The second part presents empirical information based on the personal experiences of the author. It briefly covers four distinct case studies on the micro, meso and macro levels of operational activities. The first two case studies cover unintended formations during terror attacks; the third case study covers air–ground combat formations; the fourth case study covers ad hoc military–police formations during internal policing in the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. The chapter presents the knowledge, research design and a variety of methods that are required for the proper analysis of mission formations.

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.