Of bakeries and checkpoints: Stately affects in Amman and Baghdad

Martínez, José Ciro; Sirri, Omar

doi:10.1177/0263775820919773

Cited by 22 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 71 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…He also explained how Fallujah became isolated due to the checkpoints that sealed off the city from other regions. This claim aligns with the work of Martínez and Sirri (2020), who have shown how routine encounters at checkpoints deepen grievances and create a spatial dimension to feelings of marginalization.…”

Section: Unpacking Mechanisms: Protest In Fallujahsupporting

confidence: 78%

From Victims to Dissidents: Legacies of Violence and Popular Mobilization in Iraq (2003–2018)

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A growing literature links experiences of armed conflict with postwar political behavior. This paper examines how legacies of wartime violence shape dynamics of protest in twenty-first-century Iraq. We argue that experiences of shared violence against civilians generate strong social and organizational ties, as individuals turn to neighbors, friends, and communal organizations or social groups to help them cope. These strengthened social networks endure beyond the end of the conflict, forming important vehicles that can facilitate the organization of protest when new grievances or opportunities arise. Further, we posit that these effects will be strongest when the perpetrator of wartime violence is a clear out-group—e.g., a foreign army or non-coethnic militia—which facilitates network strengthening by creating a sense of collective victimization and in-group solidarity. We support these arguments using an original database of Iraqi protests from 2010 to 2012 and data on civilian casualties during Iraq’s 2004–2009 conflict. We further test our argument with geo-referenced Arab Barometer surveys. We leverage a case study of Fallujah, based on original interviews and other qualitative data, to unpack mechanisms of network strengthening, endurance, and reactivation during the Iraqi protest wave of 2011.

show abstract

Section: Unpacking Mechanisms: Protest In Fallujahsupporting

confidence: 78%

From Victims to Dissidents: Legacies of Violence and Popular Mobilization in Iraq (2003–2018)

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Their protean components are sometimes material constituents, such as those that bakers need to make bread. In other circumstances, volatility transpires affectively-like the fluctuating moods soldiers both carry and generate (Martínez and Sirri 2020). And yet in each case, bureaucrafters wrestle constantly with the mutable-taming temperamentality into the public goods on which so many citizens rely.…”

Section: Ways Of Seeing In Baghdadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bureaucraft

Martínez,

Sirri

2023

Cult. Anthropol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Bakers and soldiers strive to provide subsistence and security to the residents of Amman and Baghdad. Yet neither set of actors is involved in straightforward administrative work; they do not sit behind desks, they rarely push paper. Their enrolment in bureaucratic assemblages and policy enactment takes on an altogether different hue. This article dissects the embodied dexterities deployed by bakers and soldiers as they carry out their jobs at bakeries and checkpoints dotted across the Jordanian and Iraqi capitals. Drawing on ethnographic work, we develop the concept of bureaucraft to analyse the variegated modes of labour without which citizens would lack for some of the most basic of public goods. Taming people and things to make them congenial to the state effect takes a great deal of shrewd manoeuvring. We strive to demonstrate that it requires craft.

show abstract

“…While power is a key aspect of infrastructure studies, the term’s connection to the normalization of militarism is understudied (see, however, Cowen, 2014; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Martínez and Sirri, 2020). The etymology of infrastructure outlined in the Oxford English Dictionary cites an early use in 1951: ‘This new term “infrastructure” … denotes fixed military facilities such as airfields, base installations and transport systems’.…”

Section: Drone Infrastructure: Militarism Embedded In Everyday Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Apartheid drone: Infrastructures of militarism and the hidden genealogies of the South African Seeker

Chandler

2022

Soc Stud Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the 1980s and 1990s, South Africa was considered a global leader in the development of unmanned aircraft largely because of the Seeker, a drone created by the state-controlled armaments industry during apartheid. This article examines how military power, state-enforced racial hierarchies, and global exchange are made visible and obscured through the drone’s unmanned system. It advances the concept of drone infrastructure, which updates theories of the drone that focus on optics and verticality. Drone infrastructure studies the web of relations organized by aircraft systems and articulates how the interplay of visibility and invisibility affectively and materially structures drone systems. The study starts with the ‘invisible’ transfer of drone technology that led to the Seeker, pointing to a shared genealogy of warfare linking South Africa, Israel, and the United States, as well as the ‘secret’ use of the Seeker in the South African Border Wars. It then turns to how, in the post-apartheid era, the Seeker was refashioned as a technology of national protection and democratic advance, a ‘visible’ symbol of the new state. Contemporary efforts to use drone aircraft in South Africa for wildlife conservation in the 2010s aim to overwrite these earlier uses, describing the air platform as international aid. Yet, the Seeker’s militarized infrastructure continues to shape drone use and the logics of white supremacy persist in the networks of relations organized by contemporary drone use in South Africa.

show abstract

Of bakeries and checkpoints: Stately affects in Amman and Baghdad

Cited by 22 publications

References 71 publications

From Victims to Dissidents: Legacies of Violence and Popular Mobilization in Iraq (2003–2018)

From Victims to Dissidents: Legacies of Violence and Popular Mobilization in Iraq (2003–2018)

Bureaucraft

Apartheid drone: Infrastructures of militarism and the hidden genealogies of the South African Seeker

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About