Kin-Work in a Time of Jihad: Sustaining Bonds of Filiation and Care for Tunisian Foreign Combatants

Abstract

In this article, I examine the politics of kin-work performed by families of Tunisian foreign combatants, whose sons were recruited to jihadi militias following the 2011 Arab Spring. Here, I refer to a form of affective labor that engenders kinship relations through the performance of intentional acts. In the context of postrevolutionary Tunisia, where the state is currently embroiled in a domestic war against terror, families of foreign combatants perform such kin-work to make a moral claim on the state to assist them in repatriating their sons. In doing so, they must work against security discourses that define their sons as terrorists, thereby excising them from the rights-bearing category of the human. Nevertheless, kin-work is more than just a political strategy. I thus also attend to more intimate registers of kin-work, where it serves as a method for inhabiting uncertainty and providing care for absent kin.

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…In contrast to Miller's () focus on how people seek incorporation within contained communities, Hinkson () centered on the opposite: how people separate themselves from communities that have expelled them. Hinkson analyzed exile among Walpili woman in Australia who are forced to leave their communities due to intracommunal political violence referred to as “the troubles,” arguing that “exile is a contradictory experience of liberation and entrapment that generates, but ultimately withholds, new possible selves and lives” (532).…”

“…Much of the work thinking through dependency and the restrictions it imposes on freedom is explicitly in the language of kinship and its potential constraints (Flores ; Hamberger ; Kantor ; Krause and Bressan ; Miller ; Shirinian ). Kantor () showed how urban migrants in Bihar, India, use food consumption practices—specifically milk—to reaffirm connection with their rural family while also signaling upward mobility.…”

“…Shirinian (, 59) showed how conceptualizations and practices of kinship as nation in postsocialist Armenia constrain citizens as family into conformity, even as some individuals find ways to transform these practices and find new queer practices of world‐making. Miller (, 598) worked with jihadis in Tunisia who are expelled from the national community because they are branded as terrorists abroad, showing how people engage in “kin‐work” that “sustains relations of care for sons engaged in jihad and seeks to pressure a resistant state into facilitating their repatriation.”…”

Doing family online: (In)formal knowledge circulation, information‐seeking practices, and support communities

“…Families are social constructs in which kinship relations need to be recognized and maintained at multiple, interlocking levels. At the micro level, significant family relations are produced and maintained through kin work (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002; di Leonardo, 1987; Dossa & Coe, 2017; Miller, 2018), emotional labor (Bakuri et al, 2020; Brennan, 2004), and everyday care practices (Baldassar & Merla, 2013), defined by the specific roles and duties of family members. “Doing family” thus means putting efforts to sustain relationships with people defined as kin in various ways such as keeping in touch or helping them perform their daily tasks.…”

Affective constructions of justice

“…The figure of the "convert" was associated with the horrendous figure of the jihadi terrorist central to the "Europe at war"-narrative, in which "us", the Europeans or the Westerners, are pitted against the inhuman enemy that threatens "the symbolic kinship of the nation, religion and humanity" (Miller 2018). In the claim that the Finnish women belong to the enemy and not to Finnish society, affects play a central role through their ability to determine the relationship between seemingly unrelated "signs", i.e.…”