Session 12: History, Identity and Violence

Session 12: History, Identity & Violence
Chair: Tobe Levin

Rethinking Identity: Lived Realities and the Continuing Effects of Violence
Rebecca Frischkorn & Yodit Fitigu
American University, USA

This paper examines the process of collective identity formation within the context of protracted violent conflict in Africa. Understanding the complexities of identity, grounded in the specific conditions of displacement and the everyday lived experience of terror, is salient within efforts of conflict resolution strategy and implementation, lasting peace and insights into the future of the nation-state. Drawing upon the border disputes in Ethiopia/Eritrea, post-civil war Mozambique, refugee camps in Tanzania, and demobilized soldiers in Angola, this paper illustrates the (re)construction of cultural, regional, and national identity prior to, during, and in the post-conflict environment. The intersection of these multiple constructions and concepts of ‘home’ and belonging are evidenced in the reworkings of violence and its effects on the nation-state.
The residual effect of violent conflict and displacement of masses of peoples upon a nation-state is not merely contained in terms of destruction. The destruction of infrastructure, of homes, of way of life should be reframed and approached within the meaning-making and identity construction it produces. Refugees and even residents in war torn countries are often described in singular categories of dysfunction, eroding all notions of normalcy in the nation-state. Yet lived experience distilled through violence is still part of the larger process of (un)conscious identity construction and its relationship to the state, family, neighbour, enemy, etc. Integral to long term peace is understanding the workings of varying identities within diverse nation-states. The blurring of labels—refugee and immigrant, urban and rural, ethnic national and regional— reconstitute a conflicted sense of place, belonging and nation. Peace is not only absence of physical violence, but justice that extents beyond warring factions and enters into perceptions and actions. Thus, in post-conflict African states, the process of identity formation is crucial in attempts at state consolidation and the international and governmental “development” efforts.

The proposed paper examines the relation between historical narratives, group memory and violence in 20th century Europe. From a theoretical point of view, the use of historical memory – that is, the specific emplotment of the past in a way that serves political goals of the present and incites future action – has been a potent factor behind almost all instances of eliminationist crimes. From the perceived role of the Armenians as enemies of ‘Turkish nationalism’ during the 1908-1915 period in the Ottoman Empire, to the association of the Jews with the ‘legacy of the 1918’ in Nazi Germany, to the anniversary of the 1389 battle of Kosovo against the Muslim Ottomans celebrated by the Serbs in 1989 and the ‘Ustasha’ ghost in the memory of Serbs nationalists in Croatia in the early 1990s, history has provided both the moral justification and the (carefully manipulated and disseminated) political stimulus for eliminationist actions.
The paper will examine these case-studies in order to analyse the ways in which historical memory, through the agency of nationalist politics, can be transformed into a licence to kill, how it can appear to provide moral justification for otherwise illegal and criminal actions, and how it can empower the members of the assaulting group to perceive their actions as part of a wider historic struggle for an otherwise accepted nationalist utopia. It is exactly this connection between the manipulative emplotment of the past (in this case, of a specific historical grievance against another group) and the empowering effect of history upon individuals and groups in the direction of translating the utopia into tangible reality that will form the backbone of the paper.