No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts (review)

Scholars associated with Uppsala University's Department of Cultural Anthropology and its Living Beyond Conflict Seminar have produced some of the most exciting recent ethnographic research on conflict and postconflict zones. No Peace No War brings together nine case studies by Uppsala faculty and graduates under the editorship of Paul Richards, who participated in 1997 as a visiting scholar in an Uppsala research group on the anthropology of violence and "new wars." The volume is completed by an introductory essay, a piece coauthored by Richards and Caspar Fithen, and a short obituary and complete bibliography of the work of Somalia researcher Bernhard Helander, to whose memory the book is dedicated.

The essays are organized "according to a bell-curve representing the continuum peace-war-peace" (p. 13). The format underscores the overall project of the text: to use ethnographic approaches to conflict to understand war and peace not as distinct, essential states but as contingent processes. The social logics of war and violence are evident even during periods of relative peace, and peace-building efforts may be found even in the midst of violent conflict. The six chapters dealing with African contexts begin with the unstable "peace" of occasionally violent interactions between pastoralists and farmers in Burkina Faso (Sten Hagberg). That chapter is followed by two cases from more conventional warzones: the Lord's Resistance Movement/Army activity in Acholiland, Northern Uganda (Sverker Finnström) and the competing solidarities of irregular forces during the fighting in Sierra Leone (Fithen and Richards). The period immediately after the officially declared end of hostilities is the concern of a chapter on youth marginalization and reintegration in Liberia (Mats Utas), while the memories of violence over a longer history are examined in the ethnicization of identities in Zimbabwe (Björn Lindgren). The final chapter returns to a kind of conflict ridden peace by looking at the provision of social services in stateless Somalia (Helander). Interspersed chapters on Cambodia (Jan Ovesen), Bosnia (Ivana Mac ek), Guatemala (Staffan Löfving), and the Tibetan Diaspora (Åsa Tiljander Dahlström) complete the curve and put the concerns of the volume into a global perspective.

Richards's first chapter is a useful roadmap to the intellectual terrain engaged by the project. In the wake of the cold war metanarratives through which war was understood until the 1980s, an "epidemiological image" (p. 3) of conflict has risen to the fore. "New war" is seen by policymakers and some scholars as a thing that erupts or breaks out (mostly in the global South). It is a disease best met by strategies of containment and amelioration, rather than diplomacy or bargaining. The result is generalized theoretical frameworks that fail to recognize that war is "one social project among many competing social projects" (p. 3) and that conflict is endemic to sociality. The schools of thought against which the chapters are implicitly positioned (neo-Malthusian environmental determinism and the "new barbarism" of irrational tribal hatreds) will be familiar to readers of Richards's previous work on Sierra Leone (see in particular Richards [1996] 1998), with the addition of a useful set of comments on the greed-versus-grievance debate, sparked by Paul Collier and other economic determinists. The African case examples do not explicitly reference these debates, but the collection as a whole makes a strong case that the specificity of ethnography offers an effective antidote to this epidemiological imaginary by shifting the emphasis away from "answering the question 'what triggered war'" and instead placing "more emphasis on exploring how people make war and peace" (p. 13, original emphasis). The goal of this shift is not an idealized call for the end of war, but recognition that violence is only one possible strategy for the playing out of social antagonisms.

No Peace No War is a volume clearly intended to be accessible to students and policymakers. For those audiences, the startling claim of the title...