Anastasia Shesterinina
This is a summary of a review of the legacy of Lee Ann Fujii’s conceptualisation of political violence, and the lessons this provides for the study of civil war. It is published in Civil Wars; the original publication can be read here.
This review highlights Lee Ann Fujii’s legacy of humanising our research on, and understanding of, political violence and her contributions on the social embeddedness of participation in violence, the endogeneity of social categories to violence and embodied and performative dimensions of violence. It argues that civil war scholars should draw on Fujii’s relational approach as an ethical radar for the methods we use and as a reality check on our analytical frameworks.
Understanding Political Violence and War
All scholars who work on questions of why and how people come to participate in political violence can benefit from insights that emerge from Fujii’s research on these questions. These insights stem from three important observations, first, it is ordinary people who are the crux of participants. Joiners, or the lowest-level participants in the communities Fujii studied in Rwanda, for example, were typically farmers who were married with children and did not hold positions of power or have training in combat before the genocide (Fujii 2009, p. 130). Second, these participants ‘stood to suffer the most from the destruction of their communities’ as they ‘were not just going after an abstract category of people, but actual neighbors they knew’ (Fujii 2009, pp. 16, 185). That is, the violence they participated in was socially and physically intimate, involving family and friends and carried out ‘up close and face-to-face’ (Fujii 2009, p. 172). Third, Fujii observes that violence is consistently put on display, or collectively staged ‘for people to see, notice, and take in’, including in counterproductive ways (Fujii 2021, p. 2).
Lessons for Civil War Studies
What are the implications of this discussion for civil war scholars? First, systematic observations at the lowest participant level can help pinpoint inconsistencies and limitations in existing approaches to central questions that drive research on civil war and advance new understandings in the field. Second, to address the puzzles that emerge from these observations, we have to look closely at the actors involved in the processes we study and how they relate to one another, to reconstruct events of interest within the social contexts in which they take place and capture their underlying dynamics. Third, and relatedly, focusing on actual participants and the full range of their actions in civil war can help us move away from macro-level concepts to uncover the variation in actions across and within social categories and theorise the agency of those involved. Such concepts as ‘ethnic civil war’ are not only unhelpful in achieving these aims but are also dangerous as they uncritically reproduce elite narratives that we should instead challenge (Fujii 2009, p. 10; 2021, p. 81).Finally, we should appreciate the importance of endogenous dynamics for the changes we observe in civil wars, the ambiguity of meanings underlying these dynamics and the contingency that results.
Researching Political Violence and War
The conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions discussed above cannot be divorced from the relational approach that Fujii developed to research methods and ethics. Interaction between the researcher and research participants lies at the heart of this approach where research is jointly produced in a specific social context.
Conclusion
Lee Ann Fujii’s contributions are diverse and deep – but above all, for scholars of civil war, I wish to emphasise Fujii’s legacy of humanising how we understand and research political violence and war. Challenging the primacy of ethnicity and other macro-structural explanations of violence, stressing the role of social embeddedness in participation in violence and taking seriously the endogeneity of social categories to violence are some of the entry points into this humanising agenda that Fujii pointed to. In terms of methods, this agenda translates into ongoing reflection on positionality, ethical dilemmas and research participants’ verbal and non-verbal cues that would be easy to brush off as ‘lies’ or ‘biases’ but that carry important meanings for participants in our research and thereby for the questions we study. Building working relationships with participants is central to gaining access to these meanings.