Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-30T06:41:38.985Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Living by the gun in Chad: armed violence as a practical occupation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2011

Marielle Debos
Marielle Debos*
Affiliation:
Institute for Social Sciences of Politics, University Paris West Nanterre, France
*
Email: mdebos@u-paris10.fr
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores men in arms’ conceptions of armed violence in a country which has been prone to a violent cycle of rebellion and repression. Based on ethnographic research in Chad, it analyses combatants’ life trajectories in an unstable political environment and a militarised economy. It moves beyond rebellion towards an analysis of the most mundane patterns of the activities conducted by men in arms, to understand what is at stake beyond times and spaces of war. It argues that armed violence is an ordinary way of expressing contestation, as well as a practical occupation or métier, a French word that indicates a non-institutionalised profession.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 409 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article was written while the author was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Research was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship sponsored by the European Commission. It is a contribution to a research programme on the transformations of war funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR). The author would like to thank Xavier Bougarel, Joshua Craze, Christine Deslaurier, Mariane Ferme, Amélie Le Renard and Louisa Lombard, for their precious comments on earlier drafts.

References

REFERENCES

Amnesty International (AI). 2008. Double Misfortune: deepening of human rights crisis in Chad. London: AI.Google Scholar
Bayart, J.-F. 1993. The State in Africa: the politics of the belly. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Bøås, M. & Dunn, K. C., eds. 2007. African Guerrillas: raging against the machine. Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buijtenhuijs, R. 1987. Le Frolinat et les Guerres Civiles du Tchad, 1977–1984: la révolution introuvable. Paris: Karthala.Google Scholar
Charlton, R. & May., R. 1989. ‘Warlords and militarism in Chad’, Review of African Political Economy 45–6: 12–25.Google Scholar
Clapham, C., ed. 1998. African Guerrillas. Oxford: James Currey.Google Scholar
de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
de Waal, A. 2009. ‘Mission without end? Peacekeeping in the African political marketplace’, International Affairs 85, 1: 99–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Debos, M. 2008a. ‘Les limites de l'accumulation par les armes: itinéraires d'ex-combattants au Tchad’, Politique Africaine 109: 167–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Debos, M. 2008b. ‘Fluid loyalties in a regional crisis: Chadian combatants in the Central African Republic’, African Affairs 107, 427: 225–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Debos, M. 2009. ‘Chad: 1900–1960’, in Sémelin, J., ed. Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, available at: http://www.massviolence.org/Chad-1900-1960?cs=print.Google Scholar
Ferme, M. 2001. The Underneath of Things: violence, history and the everyday in Sierra Leone. Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geffray, C. 1990. La Cause des Armes au Mozambique. Paris: Karthala.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, L. 1999. Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan widow in rural Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Hoffman, D. 2007. ‘The meaning of a militia: understanding the Civil Defence Forces of Sierra Leone’, African Affairs 106, 425: 639–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffman, D. 2011. ‘Violence, just in time: war and work in Contemporary West Africa’, Cultural Anthropology 26, 1: 34–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Human Rights Watch (HRW). 2005. Chad: the victims of Hissène Habré still awaiting justice. New York: HRW 17, 10 (A).Google Scholar
Kaplan, R. 1994. ‘The coming anarchy’, The Atlantic Monthly, February: 44–76.Google Scholar
Lemarchand, R. 1986. ‘Chad: the misadventures of the North–South dialectic’, African Studies Review 29, 3: 27–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marchal, R. 2008. ‘The roots of the Darfur conflict and the Chadian civil war’, Public Culture 20, 3: 429–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mbembe, A. 2005. ‘Sovereignty as a form of expenditure’, in Hansen, T. Blom & Stepputat, F., eds. Sovereign Bodies: citizens, migrants, and states in the postcolonial world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 148–68.Google Scholar
Nolutshungu, S. 1996. Limits of Anarchy: intervention and state formation in Chad. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Reyna, S. 1990. Wars Without End: the political economy of a precolonial African state. Hanover, NH: New England University Press.Google Scholar
Richards, P. 1996. Fighting for the Rain Forest: war, youth and resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: James Currey.Google Scholar
Richards, P., ed. 2005. No Peace No War: an anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts. Oxford: James Currey.Google Scholar
Roitman, J. 2005. Fiscal Disobedience: an anthropology of economic regulation in Central Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saïbou, I. 2010. Les Coupeurs de Route: histoire du banditisme rural et transfrontalier dans le bassin du lac Tchad. Paris: Karthala.Google Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. 1997. ‘Peace-time crimes’, Social Identities 3, 3: 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tubiana, J. 2008. ‘The Chad–Sudan proxy war and the ‘Darfurisation’ of Chad: myths and reality’, Working Paper 12, Small Arms Survey, Geneva: HSBA.Google Scholar
Utas, M. 2005. ‘Victimcy, girlfriending, soldiering: tactical agency in a young woman's social navigation of the Liberian war zone’, Anthropological Quarterly 78, 2: 403–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vigh, H. 2006. Navigating Terrains of War: youth and soldiering in Guinea-Bissau. Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Vigh, H. 2009. ‘Conflictual motion and political inertia: on rebellions and revolutions in Bissau and beyond’, African Studies Review 52, 2: 143–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinstein, J. 2006. Inside Rebellion: the politics of insurgent violence. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar