Jolle Demmers

Diaspora and Conflict: Locality, Long-Distance Nationalism, and Delocalisation of Conflict Dynamics

Abstract Intra-state violent conflicts are no longer fought solely in the actual war territories. Increasingly, conflicts seem to become dispersed and delocalised. Stories about American Jewish groups supporting right-wing extremism in Israel, German Croats speeding the violent collapse of Yugoslavia, and the Tamil Tigers in London, Kurds in the Netherlands, Filipinos, Khmer, and Vietnamese in California are not new to us. Within the field of Conflict Studies, however, the process of the “deterritorialisation” of conflict is left surprisingly unexplored. In this paper we will examine the political mobilisation of diaspora communities and their role in intra-state conflicts. How and why are diaspora communities involved in intra-state conflicts in their erstwhile homelands? What activities do they undertake? How are they organised? What strategies do they use? And, eventually, how do they affect contemporary conflicts? By examining these issues we aim to understand more about the dialectics between locality and conflict, the production of (long-distance) nationalism, and the relationship between virtual and spatial communities.

Neoliberal Xenophobia: The Dutch Case

This article argues for the need to identify and grapple with the complexities of the relation between xenophobia and neoliberalism. In the case of the Netherlands, the rise of xenophobia is part of a larger process of a mostly market-controlled reclaiming of symbolic forms of collectiveness in an increasingly atomized society. The 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker-provocateur Theo van Gogh played a crucial role in cementing a “culturalist,” anti-Islam regime of truth. The analysis of the van Gogh murder informs about how, in the atomized market society, the search for new forms of togetherness has translated, in the Netherlands, into a turn to the ethnos, with fantasies of purity and the moralization of culture and citizenship. Where the neoliberal project has, largely unnoticed, abolished the collective standards and solidarities of the post-World War II era, the faces of immigrants have served as ideal, identifiable flash points for new repertoires of belonging and othering.

An assemblage approach to liquid warfare: AFRICOM and the ‘hunt’ for Joseph Kony

The Western state-led turn to remote forms of military intervention as recently deployed in the Middle East and across Africa is often explained as resulting from risk aversion (avoidance of ground combat), materiality (‘the force of matter’) or the adoption of a networked operational logic by major military powers, mimicking the ‘hit-and-run’ tactics of their enemies. Although recognizing the mobilizing capacities of these phenomena, we argue that the new military interventionism is prompted by a more fundamental transformation, grounded in the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of war. We see a resort to ‘liquid warfare’ as a form of military interventionism that shuns direct control of territory and populations and its cumbersome order-building and order-maintaining responsibilities, focusing instead on ‘shaping’ the international security environment through remote technology, flexible operations and military-to-military partnerships. We draw upon assemblage as a heuristic device and the case of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) to flesh out the complex and fluid nature of liquid warfare and the ways by which power operates across space. We outline how the forging of a transnational military assemblage in the name of ‘hunting Kony’ allowed for the buildup of an archipelago of military bases and operational capabilities across Africa, which serve as hubs for the monitoring, disrupting and containment of potential risks and dangers.