Creating an Early Colonial Order

This book explains the origins of colonial rule and its dependence on large-scale military violence in eighteenth-century South Asia. By the final quarter of the long eighteenth century, war-making was not incidental to the elaboration of an infrastructure of extractive domination. The changing capacity of the early colonial regime to organize conquest with increasing efficiency was originative of a complex of laws, ideas, conception of sovereign authority, bureaucratic innovations enmeshed in a political economy of conquest that formed a distinctive early colonial order for South Asia. Colonialism—familiar to historians of the British Raj as coercive authoritarian domination—did not emerge fully formed in early nineteenth-century South Asia. Colonial conquest raised a series of important questions which are at the heart of this book: How was territory to be conquered? How was conquest to be explained and understood? How was the weight assigned to the military in colonial societies justified as an ideology of rule? In answering these questions this early colonial order cast a long shadow across the colonial and the postcolonial periods.

Konstruksi Latar dalam Fiksi Etnografis Orang-Orang Oetimu

This paper examines the setting construction in the ethnographic fiction of Orang-Orang Oetimu by Felix K. Nesi. Analytical descriptive methods, oral tradition, narratology, and setting theory were used to answer questions about: colonial and decolonial settings, socio-educational, ethnographic, and military violence setting. The results depict that the colonial and decolonial grounds left scars on the nation, which experienced previous neglect and alienation in their land. This long-experienced trauma affects massive social, education, and military violence behaviors. In addition, colonial and decolonial history also intersects with ethnographic, mainly traditional beliefs about local history and myths about “sifon,” which is a tradition of having sex after circumcision. Unpredictable and irreversible patterns of colonial, decolonial, and ethnographic settings are also shockingly strengthening the plot, proofing that the well-constructed set produces quality and innovative story, narrative, and narrating.

Moral Injury and the Psyche of Counterinsurgency

Public and clinical interest in a condition called moral injury – psychological distress resembling posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but said to originate from shame, guilt, or transgression in war experience – explicitly links moral, psychological, and political dimensions of war-making in the context of the US’s post-9/11 wars. This article critically analyzes moral injury’s politics of psychological suffering, which tends to treat morality as a universal and apolitical terrain, by reading it against soldier narratives of combat experience. American soldiers’ accounts of US military violence in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that embodied, affective, and technical dimensions of military experience constitute their own moral worlds that do not necessarily conform to moral injury’s narratives of individual transgression. These accounts show that the US’s counterinsurgency techniques produce Orientalist framings of threat and violence but also volatile and ambivalent battlefield moralities that critically comment on the ostensibly liberal and humane techniques of US war-making.

Palestinian children living amidst political and military violence deploy active protection strategies against psychological trauma: How agency can mitigate traumatic stress via life satisfaction

This exploratory study assessed the association between agency and life satisfaction, as well as the potential for life satisfaction, in its turn, to alleviate trauma symptoms and reduce negative emotion in a group of children exposed to war and military violence in Palestine. Two hundred and fifty Palestinian children, who had been recruited at primary schools in urban and rural areas, and refugee camps, completed the Multilevel Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale, Children’s Hope Scale (CHS), Children’s Impact of Event Scale (CRIES) and Positive and Negative Affect Scales. We performed structural equation modelling to evaluate the effects of agency on negative emotions and trauma symptoms via life satisfaction. The participants appeared to play an agentic role in mobilizing their own life satisfaction, and the more satisfied they were with their lives, the less they suffered from trauma symptoms. In terms of clinical practice, we advocate more active and participatory approaches to fostering children’s agency, a complex construct in need of further investigation via mixed-method quanti-qualitative and ethnographic studies.

HUMAN EXISTENCE IN THE DYNAMIC OF THE RISKS OF MILITARY VIOLENCE

Статья является составной частью авторского исследования природы человека и его индивидуального способа существования. Рассматриваются возможные изменения в существовании человека под влиянием высокой динамики рисков широкомасштабного военного насилия. Критически рассматриваются основные подходы к толкованию сущности войны и мира. В интересах оценки динамики рисков военного насилия выявляются наиболее острые противоречия современного мира, рассматривается влияние информационных технологий на социально-экономические трансформации и развитие перспективных образцов вооружения. Оценивается вероятность разработки инновационных образцов биологического оружия и риски его использования в широкомасштабном военном насилии. Формулируется вывод о влиянии динамики рисков широкомасштабного военного насилия на изменения в способе существования человека, балансирующего на грани войны и мира, и утверждении принципа жизни - живу одним днем. Доминирование такого принципа жизни с необходимостью порождает новый спектр социальных и антропологических рисков. The purpose of the article is to study possible changes in the life of a contemporary person under the influence of the dynamics of war risks. The article critically examines the main approaches to the essence of war. The influence of the contradictions of the contemporary world and the rapid development of information technologies on the risk of the outbreak of war is studied. The threat of the outbreak of war with biological weapons is considered. The features of biological weapons and biological warfare are revealed. The existence of a contemporary person on the verge of war and peace forms the principle of life - live one day.

Performance, Moving Image, Installation: The Making of Body of War and Faith

In this chapter, moving image artist Isabel Rocamora reflects on the thematic, aesthetic and philosophical concerns that drive her intermedial art practice. The essay traces the ways in which core elements of her performance work – gesture, place, temporality and presence – in turn inform and are transformed by her film and video installations. A discussion of the ethical dilemmas that motivate Body of War (2010) and Faith (2015) – namely, military violence and ethnic segregation – opens up problems of identity and alterity as well as questions of form, structure and register. To address these, Rocamora places the illuminating philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas into dialogue with her own directorial approach to casting, location, performance, cinematography, sound design and exhibition architecture. The aim of her moving images, she explains, is to draw out the personal from the collective in mise en scènes that dislodge performative action to expose ontological presence. The creative means, the essay concludes, emerge from the productive strife between the media.

Towards the Great Divide

In the two decades from the coming of Marshal Daendels (1808-1811) to the Java War (1825-1830) Javanese society was turned on its head. New concepts of honour, status and racial superiority were introduced from a Europe transformed by the industrial and political revolutions. Military uniforms were now used to demarcate rank and status, service to the colonial state transcending nobility of birth. Through despoliation and military violence the indigenous courts of south-central Java were eviscerated while racial tensions led to an anti-Chinese pogrom which started the Java War. Two contemporary wartime diaries, both written by Belgians, illustrate the racialized world of the Netherlands East Indies and the ways in which colonial wars were conducted using native auxiliaries.