Abstract
Everywhere we look, the social world is intermingling with the material world in complex and diverse ways.
1
Introduction
The octopus was confined to a small tank. It suddenly accelerated through the water, using jet propulsion, and reached the other side of the tank. I stood and watched it for several minutes. I focused on its tentacles. Haraway reminds us that ‘
From simply thinking about the octopus, I have shifted towards ‘tentacular thinking’, a concept that challenges ideas of ‘human exceptionalism and bounded individualism’
3
and accentuates relationality and entanglements. All of us are entangled in assemblages of human and non-human matter. It is impossible to discuss matter, in turn, without engaging with new materialism, a collective term encompassing an eclectic diversity of perspectives
4
which together share a ‘turn to matter’.
5
For new materialists, in short, matter is not something that is
New materialist ideas have been examined in many different contexts, and there is growing attention within the field of International Relations (IR) to matter and ‘the interconnections of human and non-human elements’ 7 – including their relevance to how we think about security, 8 international intervention 9 and democracy. 10 It is therefore interesting that these ideas remain heavily under-explored and neglected within research on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). The originality and importance of this interdisciplinary article – as an expression of ‘tentacular thinking’ – lies in addressing that gap, both conceptually and empirically. To be clear from the outset, its argument is not that there is something unique about CRSV that gives particular resonance to new materialism. Furthermore, it is not seeking to convince readers that a new materialist framework – and the word framework is deliberately used very loosely here, for reasons that will become clear – is superior to or better than other frameworks (conceptual, explanatory, analytical) applied to CRSV research. 11 The objective, rather, is to demonstrate that new materialist literature offers expanded ‘thought-worlds’ 12 that are highly pertinent to, and can further enrich, how we approach and study CRSV. In so doing, it poses the following key question: what is the conceptual and practical significance of thinking about victims-/survivors 13 of CRSV as forming part of ‘an assemblage composed of human and nonhuman materials’? 14
The article is divided into six sections. The first section reviews some of the ways that existing literature has discussed CRSV and focuses on two broad concepts that are widely emphasised – namely, structure and agency. In so doing, it compares and contrasts how these concepts are understood and approached within new materialist scholarship, as an important foundation for building the argument that ‘matter matters’ 15 for the study of CRSV. It demonstrates, for example, that new materialist ideas challenge us to rethink – or at least to think differently about – the strong accent that is frequently placed on the structural causes of CRSV, including at the international policy level. 16 The second section looks at new materialism in greater depth, drawing in particular on the work of Karen Barad, and gives some examples of its practical application in other fields of research. The third section introduces the empirical data on which the article draws – semi-structured interviews with victims-/survivors of CRSV in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). The interviews were undertaken in the context of a larger comparative study about resilience, CRSV and transitional justice. 17
The final three sections use examples from the qualitative data to evidence the significance of new materialism for thinking about and researching CRSV. It is essential to underline that applying new materialist ideas to CRSV is not about giving less importance to victims-/survivors and their experiences. Rather, it is about recognising that ‘all dynamic agentive beings are able to act 18 – and being open to exploring what potential new insights this recognition could bring to the study of CRSV, including with respect to the role of non-human agencies in shaping how victims-/survivors deal with their experiences.
Thinking About CRSV
The Bigger Picture
The octopus in the small tank. I focused on its tentacles (more correctly, its arms). ‘The tentacular’, as Branlat et al. underline, ‘embodies the processes of knowledge production, not according to the figure of the human brain but rather in a more-than-human multiorgan’. 19 It is interesting that an octopus has approximately the same number of neurons as a dog, but these neurons are not confined to its brain. Rather, they are distributed throughout its body and primarily in its arms. The body, thus, ‘has, if not a mind of its own, then a set of proto-minds in each arm that make their own decisions’. 20 An octopus’ physiology and the complexity of its motor-control system thereby challenge the idea that ‘experience must be a tightly integrated whole’. 21 This, in turn, is a useful starting point for thinking about CRSV, as an adaptation of Haraway’s ‘tentacular thinking’. 22
As extant literature implicitly makes clear, experiences of CRSV never constitute ‘a tightly integrated whole’. First, individual experiences of such violence are often diffuse, extending across war/‘peace’ dichotomies and highlighting deeper cyclical dynamics and continuums of violence that cannot be neatly contained. 23 Second, CRSV does not just affect the direct victims-/survivors. That the arms of an octopus are extremely flexible and dexterous means that they can easily manoeuvre their way into small spaces and crevices. CRSV, similarly, has tentacular dimensions, reaching into different aspects of individuals’ social ecologies (environments), including their families and communities. 24
The increased attention that the issue of CRSV now commands within international policy circles, however, does not always sufficiently reflect this experiential complexity and diffuseness. Discussing the award of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize to the Congolese gynaecologist Dr Denis Mukwege and the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, for example, Stern argues that a multiplicity of voices and experiences of CRSV ‘can easily become subsumed into a focus on only a few stories (such as Mukwege’s or Murad’s) that garner global and political leverage’. 25 Relatedly, some scholars have underlined that the common framing of CRSV as an insidious ‘weapon of war’ 26 effectively elevates some experiences over others. 27 As Meger asserts, the weapon of war narrative ‘enforces a de facto hierarchy of atrocity that considers strategic and instrumental sexual violence inherently worse than “everyday” rape and civilian-perpetrated sexual violence’. 28
As such hierarchies have practical implications as regards service provision, 29 they can also strongly shape individual narratives in ways that further help to marginalise other forms of violence. Discussing the Democratic Republic of Congo, which infamously became known as the ‘rape capital of the world’, 30 Autessere has pointed out that for many Congolese women, claiming that they have been raped has been the only way of getting access to healthcare. 31 This example thus illuminates the larger point that when such a complex and multi-dimensional conflict becomes associated with a particular type of violence, this not only compresses individual experiences but can also contribute to ‘sexuo-racialised tropes’ 32 about that conflict and its people.
All of this raises larger questions, in turn, about how to think about and research CRSV. This section focuses on two concepts – structure and agency – that are prominent within extant scholarship on CRSV. Significantly, they are also important within new materialist literature (which, moreover, rejects structure/agency binaries and other Cartesian dualisms, such as nature/culture and subject/object). 33 Hence, after discussing some of the ways that structure and agency are invoked in relation to CRSV, this section moves on to look at them from a broad new materialist perspective. This is a crucial part of demonstrating how new materialism is relevant to CRSV and what it can potentially contribute to this field of research.
Structure and Agency
Scholarship on CRSV places a strong emphasis on structures, attributing to them considerable explanatory and causal power. Houge and Lohne, for example, refer to ‘broader social and structural conditions that foster and allow for sexual violence to take place’; 34 Kreft maintains that ‘Both CRSV and sexual violence that occurs in conflict-affected settings but is not perpetrated by armed actors . . . share a common basis in patriarchal structures’; 35 and Luedke and Logan highlight ‘the “everyday” structural violence that lies beneath predominant accounts of sexual violence as a “weapon of war” in South Sudan’. 36 Concomitantly, there is a heavy accent placed on the need for policies aimed at addressing, and ultimately transforming, the structures that enable and perpetuate CRSV. 37 Indeed, international policy discourse also frequently references the crucial role of structural factors, and structural forms of violence, underpinning the occurrence and persistence of CRSV. In a recent report, for example, the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, António Guterres, underscores that ‘Concerted action and investment are urgently needed to prevent sexual violence in the first instance and to tackle the structural root causes that perpetuate these crimes’. 38
Viewed from a new materialist perspective, however, such arguments give too much weight to structural factors. In Latour’s words, ‘Asymmetries exist, yes, but where do they come from and what are they made out of?’ 39 In other words, attributing causal power to structures is essentially akin to putting the proverbial cart before the horse. It also neglects crucial material interactions and obscures ‘the relational character of events, actions and interactions’. 40 Hence, we cannot understand what structures ‘are made out of’ without exploring assemblages, their ‘heterogenous components’ 41 and the dynamic flows between these components.
In their new materialist research on gender-related violence (GRV), for example, Fox and Alldred – drawing on the work of Latour 42 – stress that ‘the micropolitics of GRV are enacted at the level of the affective assemblages that make up daily life, while it is these structuralist “explanations” [meaning explanations emphasising concepts such as heteronormativity and patriarchy] that themselves need explaining’. 43 They use the illustration of a date-rape assemblage, which, in addition to the bodies of those directly involved, might also include other more peripheral bodies (a taxi driver, a bartender, a doctor), as well as non-human matter (alcohol, clothing, mobile phones, physical locations). For Fox and Alldred, it is the relationships and affective flows between these multiple materialities – in the sense of how they affect each other and are affected, and which together form a ‘gendered violence-assemblage’ – that are crucial for explaining the date-rape and analysing what happened. 44 Even if one takes issue with such arguments or does not fully embrace them, the point is that they invite deeper critical reflection on structuralist explanations of CRSV and some of their potential limitations.
Agency is also an important theme within research on CRSV, with scholars increasingly accentuating the agency of victims-/survivors. 45 Drawing on research in Croatia and northern Uganda, for example, Touquet and Schulz analyse two particular ways that male survivors 46 of CRSV demonstrate and manifest agency: namely, by making their own choices about when to remain silent and when to speak about their experiences (and which parts of their stories to speak about in which spaces), and by actively seeking out and accessing assistance. In this way, the authors directly challenge emasculating portrayals of male survivors as having neither voice nor agency. 47
In their own research in northern Uganda, Oliveira and Baines highlight the agency of mothers who gave birth to children ‘born of war’. They examine, inter alia, how these women – who were formerly abducted (in most cases as children) by the Lord’s Resistance Army – fight for their children to be recognised as citizens with concomitant rights and ‘seek to re-emplace their children within patrilineal kinship ties’ 48 by establishing relationships with the paternal clan. Their work, like that of Touquet and Schulz, reflects a relational approach to agency. Agency, from this perspective, is not simply about individuals. It is about what Burkitt calls ‘relational connections and joint actions’ 49 – and about people collectively creating particular effects through these connections and actions.
Existing work on agency in respect of CRSV is important and broadens the analytical focus from what has been
These ideas, discussed in more detail below, share important similarities with Indigenous cosmologies.
53
Watts, for example, an Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee scholar, presents the Indigenous concept of ‘place-thought’, noting that it is ‘based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts’.
54
Coulthard, a member of the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, explains that in his community’s language, ‘land’ (
It is beyond the scope of this article to explore the synergies between new materialism and Indigenous onto-epistemologies. As a prelude to the next section, however, which takes a closer look at new materialism, it is important to underline that many new materialist ideas are not new in themselves. To treat them as such is to overlook an entire ‘Indigenous tradition of thought’ 57 – which remains insufficiently acknowledged within new materialist scholarship 58 – that long pre-dates the first references to new materialism during the 1990s. 59
Taking a Closer Look at New Materialism
This section engages in greater depth with new materialist literature, further unpacking its de-privileging of human agency and recognition of multiple and entangled forms of agency. It begins by looking at the work of Karen Barad – one of the key figures within new materialist research. The second part focuses on another significant concept (linked to both structure and agency), namely flat ontology. The final part presents some recent examples of research that engage in a very practical sense with new materialist ideas.
Agency, Intra-action and Matter
In one of her seminal articles, Barad asserts that ‘Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter’. 60 Captured in this statement is her trenchant critique of representationalism 61 – the idea that there exists an ontological distinction between practices of representation, on one hand, and that which is being represented, on the other, as if the two are independent of each other. 62 Drawing on the work of the late Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and strongly influenced by his rejection of a metaphysics that understands the world in terms of independent ontological entities with clearly defined properties and boundaries, Barad both embraces and builds on his argument that phenomena constitute the principal ontological unit.
According to her agential realism, ‘phenomena are ontologically primitive relations – relations without preexisting relata’.
63
In this ‘ontological indeterminancy’,
64
there are no such boundaries as ‘subject’/‘object’. It is only ‘through specific agential intra-actions that the contours and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful’.
65
Everything is ‘intra-acting’ – and hence ‘lively’
66
– and it is these intra-actions that enact agential ‘cuts’, thereby separating ‘subject’ and ‘object’.
67
These are not, however, absolute separations. They are contingent, ‘
Agency, therefore, is not an attribute or something that only human beings can exercise. Agency is relational, dynamic and fluid, distributed among agentially intra-acting materialities that produce phenomena. It is ‘“doing”/ “being” in its intra-activity’. 69 It follows, thus, that for Barad and other new materialists, matter is not something passive and inert. It has its own ‘vitality’ 70 and ‘creativity’; 71 it is ‘intelligent’, 72 ‘productive’ 73 and an active ‘actant’. 74 In Barad’s agential realist ontology, ‘matter is a dynamic expression/articulation of the world in its intra-active becoming’. 75 Indeed, she insists that we do a fundamental disservice to matter, and to the scope of its capacity, by not recognising its agency. 76
Flat ontology and the Eschewal of Structuralist Explanations
The above ideas, in turn, help to elucidate new materialism’s flat (or monist) ontology, 77 which is connected to its aforementioned rejection of dualisms. Cutting across these dualisms, flat ontology puts all actors and actants on an equal footing, 78 rather than privileging some over others. 79 In this sense, it is deeply anti-hierarchical. Discussing, for example, actor-network theory (ANT) – which explores the myriad actors, human and non-human, that form a network – Latour highlights ANT’s claim that ‘modern societies cannot be described without recognizing them as having a fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structures, systems’. 80 Working within a relational flat ontology, in short, means that there is little place for structuralist explanations – which are also incompatible with new materialism’s emphasis on immanence 81 and the idea that there are no externally governing systems and structures 82 – because attributing power to structures neglects to deal with the crucial question of where this power comes from. To cite Latour, ‘power, like society, is the final result of a process and not a reservoir, a stock, or a capital that will automatically provide an explanation. Power and domination have to be produced, made up, composed’. 83
The concept of flat ontology, however, is controversial and raises a number of important issues. One of the criticisms is that flat ontology is deeply discordant with the fact that we live in a world that is far from flat. How do we reconcile, for example, the idea of flat ontology with the existence of privilege and inequality? 84 Relatedly, how do we talk about flat ontology when the effects and dynamics of key processes that are fundamentally shaping the world we live in, such as climate change and globalisation, are the very opposite of ‘flat’? 85 Another set of concerns is that flat ontology leaves dangerous loopholes, in the sense of detracting from harms caused by human activities – and thereby diluting responsibility for those harms. 86 Van Dyke, for example, asserts that ‘If we are only interested in charting relationships among entities, and we consider people no more important than any other entities in the network, then we have no logical means by which we can hold perpetrators of violence and suffering to be accountable for their actions’. 87
Significant questions have been asked, therefore, about the practical utility of a flat ontology that treats human and non-human actors equally, without recognising ‘the distinctive properties/powers that human beings possess’ 88 – and about the ‘naiveté’ of conflating agencies that are manifestly very different (e.g. the agency of an animal and the agency of a human). 89 With regards to CRSV, moreover, one could easily question the merits of a flat ontology that would appear to negate or discount the significant gendered inequalities that are an everyday reality for many victims-/survivors. 90
There is not space within this article to offer an in-depth analysis of flat ontology or to explore in detail the many critical voices problematising and challenging the concept. In response to some of the above arguments, however, it is important to emphasise the following three points. First, new materialism, to reiterate, is not a single school of thought, and not all new materialists embrace a flat ontology – or do so in the same way. While Bennett, for example, refers to ‘a heterogenous monism of vibrant bodies’, 91 Conty points out that some new materialists contest a flat ontology that makes no distinction between different agencies, ‘such as anthropologists Tim Ingold and Eduardo Kohn, who seek to transform the human/nonhuman distinction into an animate/inanimate distinction that is able to differentiate between stones and anteaters’. 92
Second, rather than focus only on some of the possible problems associated with flat ontology, it is also necessary to consider what it can potentially offer in terms of new insights and understandings – including with regards to how we think about power. This, in turn, highlights that flat ontology is far from being apolitical. Jones et al., for example, maintain that ‘the flat ontology is
Third, a flat ontology does not mean that the world
Some Practical Applications of New Materialism
Scholars have examined, inter alia, how new materialism challenges the field of IR 97 – and how relational theories more broadly reflect, in part, an ‘impetus to decolonise IR conceptions of “the world” (as one)’. 98 The complexities of new materialism, however, mean that its practical application is not always immediately obvious. To build on the foregoing discussion, therefore, it is useful to briefly look at some of the ways that scholars have used new materialist ideas and theories such as ANT in their own work. As the ultimate aim of this article is to demonstrate the relevance of new materialism to the study of CRSV, the commonality running through the following examples is that all of them relate to conflict, justice or gender-based violence.
Coward’s work on the destruction of urban infrastructures and built environments (urbicide) during war does not directly refer to new materialism, yet there are various new materialist ideas woven into his arguments. Presenting modern urban life as ‘a complex assemblage of heterogeneous parts, human and nonhuman’,
99
for example, he underlines that the phenomenon of urbicide challenges anthropocentric framings of political violence. He further demonstrates that buildings are not just structures, emphasising that they are material environments ‘in and through which individuals live their lives’ – and indeed are constitutive of those lives.
100
When buildings are destroyed, therefore, so too are entire assemblages and, thus, the possibilities of ‘being-with-others’.
101
Golańska’s research, also focused on urbicide, is explicitly new materialist. She discusses urbicidal violence against Palestinian communities in the context of Jewish settlement policy, arguing that it ‘operates in an assemblage-like manner’.
102
She illuminates, for example, the significance of the landscape, noting that: the natural scenery co-constitutes the ideologically shaped apparatus of visual control, operationalizing its disciplinary panoptical qualities. Whereas the inside of the settlements located on elevated positions remains inaccessible to the Palestinians’ gaze, the former’s villages and towns, situated down in the valleys, are exposed to visual penetration by settlers and IDF [Israel Defence Forces] soldiers, creating traumatizing mechanisms of permanent optical invigilation.
103
Her research thus unpacks the entanglement of human and non-human agencies – and their mobilisation – in the perpetration of urbicidal violence against Palestinians. By extension, it illustrates how these entanglements, as complex assemblages, ‘produce discriminatory geographies of displacement’ 104 that have wider regional and geopolitical implications.
Working within the tradition of science and technology studies (STS), Campbell offers a novel application of ANT – which has its roots in STS – in the context of international justice. Building on ANT’s rejection of ‘the social’ as an explanatory concept and Latour’s emphasis on the advantages of ‘dissolving the notion of social force’, 105 Campbell explores the role of legal practices in constructing ‘the social’, through a specific focus on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 106 and transitional justice mechanisms in BiH. Examining these processes as ‘practices of association’, 107 she assesses ‘how international criminal law and transitional justice offer distinctive practices that reassemble society during and after conflict in different ways’. 108 This is a very novel way of thinking about international criminal justice and transitional justice (including the differences between them), and about how we might ultimately evaluate their impact, successes and failures. Relatedly, Christensen’s work explores the transversality of power across different sites of justice, underscoring how these sites affect and are affected by each other – as justice assemblages. Rather than accentuate the agency of institutions, therefore, his sites of justice framework ‘points toward a more global, pluralistic, and relational idea of the fight(s) against injustice’. 109 It thus draws crucial attention to the multiplicity of actors and agencies – too often overlooked in Euro- and Western-centric legal discourses – involved in the pursuit of justice.
More directly related to the thematic of CRSV, in Renold’s project ‘Relations Matter’ (an unplanned spin-off from a larger project focused on young people in the Welsh Valleys), she worked with six 15-year-old girls in a school in Wales. Part of their discussions centred on how young people, including the girls themselves, experienced sexual and gender-based violence. Renold notes that in the first meeting, one of the girls described how some boys in the school would lift up girls’ skirts using rulers. Another girl immediately materialised this occurrence in ink, writing ‘RULER TOUCHING’. The ruler’s ‘human-non-human vitality’, in turn, prompted deeper reflections on what else it ‘could be and become’. 110 Rulers, thus, were one of the materials that emerged from the discussion as important non-human actors in larger ‘sexual violence assemblages’. 111
Prioletta’s research draws on feminist new materialism to unpick the significance of matter for explaining gender violence among children in kindergarten (nursery school). Focusing on children’s play objects, and specifically on building blocks, she examines these blocks as ‘key actors in the perpetration and perpetuation of hierarchal gender divisions and of gender violence between students’. 112 Based on her time in two kindergartens in Ontario, Canada, she describes, inter alia, boys ‘stockpiling’ the blocks – to prevent girls from using them – and building structures that limited girls’ access to and movement within the play environment. 113 Emphasising the power of these ‘boy-block assemblages’, 114 the pivotal point, for Prioletta, is that the boys could not maintain control and dominance by themselves. Rather, ‘human and nonhuman matter assembled and produced gendered affects and effects’. 115
Finally, it is important to note Fox and Alldred’s previously mentioned research examining how new materialism – notably its post-anthropocentrism, flat ontology and emphasis on relationality – can contribute to our understanding of GRV. It is particularly clear from their work that adding a new materialist lens to the study of CRSV would represent a major – and indeed radical – ontological and epistemological shift. They argue, for example, that ‘From a relational perspective, GRV is the flow of violent affects within assemblages of materialities’. 116 These assemblages necessarily consist of both human bodies and non-human matter, meaning that the actors within each ‘gendered violence-assemblage’ are multiple. Fox and Alldred also foreground, therefore, the micropolitical level as the focus of analysis; the subordination of women emerges from myriad everyday interactions, ‘rather than from some unseen, top-down yet all-pervasive patriarchal social relation’. 117 As to how we might practically research GRV, they suggest a research question that takes as its starting point the violence-assemblage and aims at unpacking the myriad materialities and affects that constitute this assemblage. Concretely, ‘a study of rape used as a weapon of war might ask: what are the micropolitics of sexual violence during military conflict?’ 118 Another angle of enquiry would be to analyse how ‘patternings of gendered power and privilege are produced and reproduced within the assemblages of everyday living’. 119
Taken together, these various examples illustrate the richness of new materialism and some of the multiple and creative ways that it can be used in different (and overlapping) fields of research. In short, it ‘fizzes with possibilities’, 120 and the remainder of this article explores some of these possibilities with respect to CRSV. Because its arguments draw on fieldwork data, it is essential – as a lead-in to the three empirical sections – to first provide some crucial information about the data.
The Underpinning Study
This article draws on data from a now-completed five-year research study (henceforth ‘the study’) about some of the ways that victims-/survivors of CRSV demonstrate resilience. 121 While resilience has received surprisingly little attention within extant literature on CRSV, outside of this context there exists a wealth of research on the concept. Given the diversity of approaches to resilience across different disciplines, from psychology and human geography to education and neuroscience, it is important to briefly note that the study on which this article draws conceptualised resilience as a process that is ‘co-facilitated by individuals and the systems of which individuals are part’. 122 This framing is consistent with a larger shift within resilience scholarship away from person-centred analyses towards more complex social-ecological and multi-systemic theorisations. 123
The study centred on three countries that have all experienced high levels of CRSV over different time periods – namely, BiH, Colombia and Uganda. A crucial rationale for this comparative approach was to explore what resilience ‘looks’ like, and how it manifests, in different social-ecological environments, and to examine the functioning of key resilience enablers in highly varied cultural contexts. The comparative design also added to and enhanced the study’s originality. Research – and in particular empirical research – on CRSV most frequently focuses on a single country, although there are exceptions. 124
The quantitative part of the study involved the design, piloting and application of a questionnaire. Between May and November 2018, a total of 449 female and male victims-/survivors of CRSV in BiH, Colombia and Uganda completed the questionnaire, the data from which have been presented and analysed elsewhere. 125 The questionnaire included the Adult Resilience Measure (ARM), a 28-item scale that measures an individual’s protective resources across individual, relational and contextual sub-scales. 126 Participants’ total ARM scores were used to create quartiles; and in the qualitative part of the study, interviewees were selected from each set of country quartiles. Ensuring an even spread of scores within the interview sample was important for exploring whether and how these scores translated into the qualitative data in the sense of core themes. A total of 63 women and men were involved in the interview stage of the research (21 in each country). The interviews – which I and two postdoctoral researchers undertook in BiH, Colombia and Uganda respectively – took place between January and August 2019.
The research received full ethics approval from the host institution and the research funder. Additionally, ethics approvals were secured from relevant bodies in each country. In BiH and Colombia, the study was reviewed and approved by university ethics committees in Sarajevo and Bogatá. In Uganda, where a national process exists, approval was sought and obtained from a government-authorised local ethics committee (this approval had to be renewed on an annual basis) and from the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology. An independent ethics board, made up of eight highly experienced scholars from six different countries, also played a crucial oversight role and provided valuable input.
During the many months that it took to put in place all of the necessary ethics approvals, there were a number of complex issues that had to be comprehensively addressed and worked through – from ensuring that participants (and in particular those with low literacy levels) were giving genuinely informed consent and dealing with unexpected findings to minimising the risks of potential re-traumatisation and maximising fair benefit sharing – issues that I have written about in previous work. 127 Several in-country organisations played a fundamental role in facilitating the fieldwork in BiH, Colombia and Uganda; and their involvement, in turn, created an important support and referral network within the project design. In cases where, for example, participants sought legal advice, they could be helped to find trusted sources of information.
Many of the Colombian participants were actively involved in women’s associations, and some of them were social leaders and had their own associations. In other cases, however, and particularly in BiH and Uganda, the research created space for participants to meet other victims-/survivors of CRSV, particularly through the reflections workshops that took place during the penultimate year of the study. These workshops – which had to be significantly downsized due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to ensure social distancing – were also a valuable opportunity to share, explore and discuss with small groups of participants some of the core research findings.
As much of my work to date has drawn on the entire qualitative dataset, in this article I will focus specifically on the fieldwork and interviews that I conducted in BiH. Using pseudonyms throughout to protect the interviewees’ identities, I will also note their gender and ethnicity. This is relevant because existing scholarship on CRSV during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war has overwhelmingly centred on women – and in particular Bosniak women – and hence one of the study’s core aims was to ensure that the research samples reflected some of the heterogeneity of victims-/survivors of CRSV in BiH (as well as in Colombia and Uganda). In contrast, it was not one of the aims to analyse the data using a new materialist lens, and indeed new materialism formed no part of the research design. In what follows, however, I present some recent and exploratory reflections on non-human agencies and forces within interviewees’ social ecologies (environments) – and how they potentially ‘matter’. I also give examples of new materialist-type questions that I might have asked had I designed the research differently. To reiterate an earlier point, the empirical sections make clear that new materialism, as this article approaches it, is fundamentally
An Interview by the Lake
The interview guide used in this study (for all three countries) included the question ‘Who or what is the source of support in your life?’ In BiH, one of the interviewee’s answers particularly stood out. While interviewees overwhelmingly spoke about support from their families and children, ‘Nusret’ – a 55-year-old Bosniak man – focused on a local lake. In his words: Well, I have been hoping that things will get better. This is a hope I have. And, well, this birthplace, everything I have learned here. In fact, the water, water is to me . . . I possibly would not have returned here ever [following his experiences during the Bosnian war], but it is my birthplace, and this lake that I have had since I was a child – as they say I was born in the lake. This is something that keeps me going here.
129
This quotation could simply be interpreted as evidencing that the lake was a significant resource in Nusret’s life. It was something that he used (he also spoke about taking his boat out on the lake when he felt particularly under stress) to help him deal with the past. Yet, this is to emphasise
Thinking about the lake also accentuates a central linkage between agency and the Spinozian idea of affect – ‘an ability to affect and be affected’. 133 Scholarship has examined some of the many ways that victims-/survivors of CRSV may be affected – physically and/or psychologically and emotionally – by their experiences. What remains unexplored are the affective capacities of materiality. Just as Nusret affected the lake (and some of the wildlife that visited it and lived in it) by rowing in it, occasionally fishing in it, sitting by it, so too it affected him. He would often spend hours sitting by the lake. As he explained: ‘I rest here. I rest mentally. Like this, I observe the ducks, fish. Pigeons come along. I feed the ducks. Like that, and I don’t think about problems’.
As I re-read Nusret’s interview now, four years on, I think about the water, a ‘world of flows, connections, liquidities, and becomings’. 134 I think back to the octopus in the tank, confined, unable to fully explore this world. Tentacular thinking. Tentacularity as relationality. Human bodies – the bodies of those who share their stories with us and our own bodies as researchers – are ‘always part of, and intra-acting with other bodies (human and non-human)’. 135 I interviewed Nusret in his work shed located right next to the lake. He sat the entire time with his body facing towards the water. A radio was playing when I arrived. ‘I put the music on, over there, like that. . .’. He drank a bottle of beer as we talked. ‘I also like to drink, and I sit and find solitude and that’s it. Until it goes away a bit, and, you know, that’s it’.
I asked Nusret questions about his life, about the war, about justice. I could have given attention to the ‘affective flows’ 136 between the different materialities that constituted a fundamental and highly fluid assemblage in his life. The lake; ducks; fish; pigeons; his boat; his work shed; his work tools; the radio; beer. I could, for example, have tried to better understand how the lake affected him. Did it always affect him in the same way? Were there seasonal aspects to how it affected him? Did it affect him differently depending on whether he was merely looking out at the lake or more actively engaging with it (e.g. by fishing or being out on his boat)? How did other materialities within the assemblage influence and affect each other? Did beer and his level of sobriety affect what he listened to on the radio, and how the sounds affected him? Did the type of work he was doing, and the particular tools he was using, affect how he engaged with other parts of the assemblage? What about when other human agencies entered the assemblage (he ‘loved being alone’, but said that sometimes friends came and sat with him by the lake)? Did this alter the affective capacities of the assemblage and, if so, how?
Wood underlines that ‘To neglect the analysis of assemblage is to overlook the relational and processual detail of a happening’. 137 Nusret’s assemblage was a central part of his story and integral to understanding how he was dealing with what had happened to him during the Bosnian war. He had been imprisoned in several different camps and maintained that he had survived ‘Golgotha’. I might have explored with him what the different materialities in his life (and with which he intra-acted) had ‘done’ to his memories of that Golgotha and to the frequency with which he re-lived his experiences. I also wondered whether part of the explanation for his deep attachment to the lake was that it had given him back the sense of freedom that was once taken away from him.
Ultimately, it is impossible to talk about Nusret’s interview without also talking about the lake. The two were deeply intertwined. What the interview illustrates, thus, is the significant scope that exists for analysing how matter and non-human agencies affect victims-/survivors of CRSV, their relationship-building processes and how they deal with the multiple legacies of their experiences. The larger point is that part of what makes new materialism highly relevant to CRSV is that it ‘invites researchers to open research relationships, thinking, and representations to beings, things, and objects previously ignored as active agents’. 138
Soil Stories
Mentz’s fascinating work explores our embeddedness in a world of brownness; ‘Brown fluids and solids surround us; we cannot live without touching them’. 139 When I think about the colour brown, I think about soil and about two particular interviews that included soil stories. The first of these was my interview with ‘Dubravka’, a Bosnian Croat woman in her early 60s. She lived alone and spent a lot of time working on her land, which she described as her resource. She had received lavender through a non-governmental organisation, as part of its occupational therapy programme, and spoke about the work that she had done to prepare the soil – and continued to do to keep it healthy. She also talked about how she benefitted from her interactions with it; ‘the soil draws out all the negative energy from me’. 140
It could just be argued that Dubravka, like Nusret, had found a way to heal herself, in this case through gardening. Thinking about this from a new materialist perspective, however, the pivotal point is that soils are not ‘inert substrates waiting to be shaped by humans’, but, rather, ‘intricate and dynamic assemblages that are very much alive’. 141 The soil not only positively affected Dubravka’s mood and wellbeing, but it had also helped her to flourish in new ways. Her efforts on the land had paid off and she had made a success of growing the lavender; she now distilled it, bottled it and made her own boxes and labels. ‘So, I have discovered my creativity’, she enthused. Again, and to be very clear, I am not arguing that human and non-human agencies are the same. What I am highlighting is that when we think about victims-/survivors of CRSV and their everyday lives, we rarely think about or give attention to ‘the vital affectivity of all matter’ 142 – and how it affects their lives.
‘Fatima’, a Bosniak woman in her early 40s, also talked about soil, but in a very different way. She and her family were internally displaced within BiH and she had no desire to return to their pre-war home. To put down new roots, she had taken out a bank loan to build a small house. It was located among several other houses up a steep hill. From the outside, the house looked unfinished and neglected. Inside, she pointed to a dark patch on the ceiling in the lounge, explaining that the family had to dry their clothes in the room, which had created a problem with mould. The log-burning stove remained unlit during the interview, although it was February, and Fatima mentioned several times that she felt cold.
She also talked about earlier mudslides, the result of heavy rains, which had led to significant soil erosion and caused damage to her home; ‘When the slopes moved, the soil from above came down onto the house’. 143 Her words evoke Bennett’s argument that we are ‘always engaged in an intricate dance with nonhumans, with the urgings, tendencies, and pressures of other bodies, including air masses, minerals, microorganisms’. 144 There was a sense that the ‘pressures’ exerted by the soil had added to the pressures that Fatima felt in her life. ‘Everything is pressuring me’, she maintained. She was still paying off the bank loan, which was a considerable financial strain, and the damage caused by the soil had made her question her decision to construct the house. ‘Everything is building up and it is worsening my situation’.
Comparing and contrasting the two interviewees’ soil stories, soil was a very positive agency in Dubravka’s life. She emphasised that when she worked with the soil, ‘I am in my own world’. She reinforced this when, early in the interview, she explained that having recently retired, ‘I am living another phase of my life, the one I wished for; where I would have the whole 24 hours for myself, without other people impacting my life, like they did until now’. She was still living in the same place, but she now had much more time to devote to her land, and this change in her circumstances had altered her relationship with the soil and the latter’s ‘thing-power’, meaning ‘a force exercised by that which is not specifically human (or even organic) upon humans’. 145
The soil’s ‘thing-power’ was linked, in turn, to the care that Dubravka extended to it. Pertinent here is Guibert and Tostevin’s reference to soil as assemblages ‘created by plants, animals, fungal networks and the care of human communities’. 146 This neglects the reciprocal dynamics of care as a relationship to which both carer and cared-for contribute. 147 Viewed through a new materialist lens, moreover, the identities of carer and cared-for are not stable. As Johns-Putra argues, ‘care has to be recognized as intra-active: carer and cared-about are identities formed in a dynamic of agential separability. These entities come to be, that is, they come to matter, in the very terms of the encounter’. 148 Thinking in this way raises important questions about the different materialities involved in acts of care in the context of CRSV – and how they ‘have agency and identity in their coming together’. 149 Such questions are highly relevant to the issue of how we extend care to victims-/survivors of CRSV, what is involved in this process and how they themselves engage in acts of care towards different agencies, human and non-human.
Returning to Fatima’s story, here the agency of the soil was far more negative, a brown, dirty and unwanted intrusion. To better understand this agency, however, it is also important to know more about Fatima’s life and marriage. She spoke about her husband’s relationship with alcohol, cigarettes and money – materialities that strongly affected his behaviour towards her; ‘I just needed a sensitive, caring husband’. Her decision to take out the loan was about putting a secure roof over her children’s heads, but it was also about asserting herself within the marriage. Choosing ‘capable’ as one of three words to describe herself (together with ‘strong’ and ‘smart’), she stressed that: ‘I have three children in school, I feed them, I cook for them, I go to one job, then to the other job [she worked as a cleaner]. This house, here, it would not be standing if it was not for me, if I did not take out a loan and do two jobs’.
It was through this decision, however, that she had entered into an affective relationship with the soil; and the materiality of the soil had affected her life and helped to sustain her feelings of frustration – both with respect to her marriage and her life more generally. In particular, it was as if the movement of the soil had affected Fatima’s sense of her own possibilities to move. She told me: ‘And now, this soil started moving. And now, you have to move forward. You have to go somewhere. You cannot now . . . I wish . . . If I could, I would leave all this and go somewhere’. Indeed, as Mentz argues, ‘The problem with brown mixtures . . . is that we can get stuck in them’. 150
Fatima’s interview, thus, ultimately highlights a bigger point about flat ontology and structure. Like many of the interviewees, Fatima did not experience the world as flat – and her relationship with her husband was a key factor in this regard. As previously discussed, however, a new materialist analysis would not explore this unevenness by reifying agency ‘in abstract structures that serve as hidden actors’. 151 The focus, rather, would be on identifying how multiple agencies help to create and sustain it – and this would certainly be another important and novel contribution to scholarship and research on CRSV. Had I been working with a new materialist framework, for example, I would have wanted to explore Fatima’s marriage as an assemblage – and the various materialities and affective flows that constituted that assemblage. I would also have given more attention to her soil story and to the soil’s aforementioned ‘thing-power’, both within the assemblage of her marriage and her life more broadly.
Fire, Matter and Interview Dynamics
It was a crisp and sunny February morning when I arrived at the home of ‘Fazila’, a Bosniak woman in her early 50s. She lived in what I have always considered to be one of the most beautiful parts of BiH. I removed my footwear, as is customary in Bosnian homes, and she immediately admonished me for not wearing socks and for standing barefooted in her hallway. This was not our first meeting. Several months earlier, Fazila had completed a study questionnaire. Prior to that, I had met her back in 2014 through a mutual acquaintance. In the lounge, she opened a cupboard that was full of woolly socks and gave me a pair to put on. Socks that I still have in a drawer at home; socks in which there is ‘memory materialized’ 152 ; threads that keep me connected in some way to that period of fieldwork and to the feelings and emotions that it evoked for me. Before we started the interview, Fazila bustled around, making coffee, bringing over some home-made biscuits and checking on the wood-burning stove, to which she twice added logs during the interview.
‘How do you understand the term “survivor”?’ All interviewees were asked this question (and also how they understood the term ‘victim’). While many of Fazila’s responses had been quite short, she now gave an unexpectedly detailed answer. For me, it was the most powerful part of the interview, and it is therefore important to share what she said in full, with the exception of those sentences that could potentially reveal where she lived. In her words: Now, well, I was here, my sofa was down there, there was a small kitchen; this current one was not built. The bullet went above my head, like this, there in the wall, and this is some kind of survival. I rushed out of the fire. I went there into one room. Soldiers were walking around. You see everything burning. Where will you go, what will you do? You worry about what is happening with the neighbours. I got up and walked here, around the house. I see everything burnt, everything turned to soot . . . Well, this is it, well, as they say . . . It takes all the courage in you to, well, survive it.
153
As I reflect on this paragraph now, I think about the interactions of these different materialities. A war crime assemblage; ‘a network of human and non-human actors exerting force and agency in dynamic interaction’. 154 I think about the possible memories stored within the materiality of the house, the parts of it that survived the attack. The entwining of matter and memories. 155 I imagine a whizzing sound. The power of a bullet to force itself into a human body; to transform a human body ‘from living to dead’. 156 At the time of the interview, I distinctly remember how my focus shifted from the flames of the log fire (which also made me think back to Fatima’s unlit fire) to the fire that had engulfed the house more than 20 years earlier. I imagined it so vividly. A war crime that I had only ever read about. ‘You see everything burning’. The power of the interviewee’s words came not just from her, but also from the log fire. Its agency. It helped me to imagine the scene. I can still imagine it.
As the interview discussion moved to other topics, the fire’s energy changed. It became comforting. Warmth radiated from the burning logs, accompanied by occasional crackling sounds. The flames gently danced, mixed with the rich aroma of Bosnian coffee. The woollen socks felt coarse against my skin but also snug, generating additional warmth. At one point, Fazila leaned forward to pick up her packet of cigarettes from the coffee table. She lit up and shifted her position, her legs now curled up next to her on the sofa. A curl of smoke drifted through the air. Dennis suggests that ‘smoking pleasure and the smoker herself are emergent in and through relations with an air that has its own agency’. 157
When I think back to that morning in February four years ago, what stands out is how matter intra-actively and agentically shaped the atmosphere of the interview and its dynamics. Rarely is the significance of matter acknowledged in qualitative research, including research on CRSV. We mainly focus on what the interviewee is saying, on demeanour, body language, reactions. Storytelling, however, ‘is not just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active’. 158 In other words, storytelling (and interviewing) is an intra-active process that implicates matter. Exploring this in the context of CRSV would not only be something entirely novel, but it would also enrich discussions about methodology and how we interview victims-/survivors of CRSV.
This could also be taken further. If we proceed from a basic new materialist starting point that nothing has ontological primacy, we cannot presume to know in advance what is important – or how exactly we will undertake a research study (although university ethics committees/institutional review boards and research funders typically require us to be very specific about this). For example, ‘how do we determine the “object of our knowledge” – the “problem” we want to study in assemblage?’
159
Looked at in this way, thus, there is a case to be made for engagement with post-qualitative inquiry. As St. Pierre underlines, post-qualitative inquiry is not a methodology – and nor does it ‘begin with or use
Conclusion
Addressing the fact that existing scholarship on CRSV is yet to substantively engage with scholarship on new materialism, this interdisciplinary article began by asking the question: what is the conceptual and practical significance of thinking about victims-/survivors of CRSV as forming part of ‘an assemblage composed of human and nonhuman materials’? 162 It has endeavoured to answer this in two key ways. First, it has examined how new materialism has unexplored relevance to how we think about and use the concepts of structure and agency in research on CRSV. Second, it has drawn on interviews with victims-/survivors in BiH to practically demonstrate what new materialism can potentially contribute to scholarship on CRSV, including through the types of questions that we ask and the ontological starting points that we proceed from. Ultimately, it has made clear that thinking about CRSV through a new materialist lens is quintessentially ‘a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think’. 163
It is important to return to two specific points that the article has highlighted. The first relates to the fact that there are critical gaps in new materialist literature as regards acknowledging the significance of Indigenous cosmologies and scholarship. Reflecting on a talk that she attended in Edinburgh given by Bruno Latour, for example, Todd – an Indigenous feminist scholar – recalls: ‘I was left wondering, when will I hear someone reference Indigenous thinkers in a direct, contemporary and meaningful way in European lecture halls?’ 164 CRSV is an important area of research in which the synergies between Indigenous beliefs and new materialism could be usefully explored (which should not deflect from the fact that Indigenous histories and experiences fundamentally challenge new materialism’s flat ontology) as part of a bigger process of pluralising how we think about such violence and expanding ‘the space for other forms of knowledge’. 165
The second point is that new materialism, when applied to CRSV, is not about making victims-/survivors less important. It is about exploring and acknowledging their entanglement with matter – and how this ‘matters’. Bennett poses the question ‘Why advocate the vitality of matter?’ 166 She also gives her own answer: ‘Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’. 167 Elaborating further, she explains that ‘It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies’. 168 The cardinal point is that these ‘nonhuman powers’ need to be taken seriously in research on CRSV, not least because they form an intrinsic part of the wider relational and affective assemblages within which victims-/survivors deal with their experiences and rebuild their lives.
The idea for this article developed in part from an active assemblage. The octopus in the tank, unable to move in the way it wanted to. Perhaps this is the reason that it so affected me and the reason that I still vividly remember it. Its arms and suckers pressed up against the glass. My own fingers touching the glass on the other side, wanting to make a connection. ‘We must continually ask, what conditions do we need for each body to flourish here?’ 169 This question is no less relevant to research, scholarship and, ultimately, policy work on CRSV.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
ORCID iD
1.
.2.
3.
4.
.5.
6.
(emphasis in the original).7.
.8.
.9.
.10.
.11.
.12.
.13.
14.
.15.
.16.
. Last accessed May 3,2023.17.
18.
.19.
.20.
21.
22.
23.
.24.
.25.
.26.
. Last accessed January 22,2023.27.
.28.
29.
.30.
. Last accessed November 9,2022.31.
.32.
.33.
.34.
.35.
.36.
.37.
38.
. Last accessed February 12,2023.39.
40.
.41.
42.
43.
.44.
45.
.46.
47.
. The authors also comment on the significance of ‘local opportunity structures or "choice architectures" that both constrain and shape the forms that the agency of male survivors takes’. Ibid.,217. Linking back to the previous discussion,this could be viewed as another example of giving too much causal power to structure. Reframing these ‘local opportunity structures’ as ‘local opportunity assemblages’ would mean exploring ‘the range of affects and materialities’ – human and non-human – that constitute these assemblages. See Fox and Alldred,‘New Materialities,Micropolitics’.48.
.49.
.50.
.51.
52.
53.
.54.
55.
56.
57.
.58.
59.
.60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
.65.
66.
67.
.68.
(emphasis in the original). See also Barad,Meeting the Universe Halfway,393.69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
.79.
80.
81.
82.
.83.
84.
.85.
.86.
.87.
88.
.89.
90.
.91.
92.
.93.
94.
.95.
.96.
.97.
.98.
.99.
100.
101.
102.
.103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
.108.
109.
.110.
.111.
112.
.113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
119.
120.
.121.
122.
.123.
124.
125.
126.
. Last accessed March 11,2023.127.
.128.
.129.
130.
.131.
132.
133.
134.
.135.
.136.
.137.
.138.
.139.
140.
141.
.142.
143.
144.
.145.
146.
147.
148.
.149.
150.
151.
152.
.153.
154.
.155.
.156.
.157.
.158.
.159.
.160.
(emphasis in the original).161.
162.
163.
.164.
165.
166.
167.
168.
169.
.