When wounds travel

Dewachi, Omar

doi:10.17157/mat.2.3.182

Cited by 30 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For those at the margins, this may involve enacting particular tropes of vulnerability that fit with images of Western philanthropy and global human rights principles and discourse. Moreover, papers become important means for obtaining legitimacy and escape, as evidenced in Omar Dewachi's (2015) searing narrative of Iraqi men and women seeking to escape devastation during the US-led occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2011. Here, people must constantly reenact painful experiences of death and devastation in order to be able to claim compensation and the opportunity to escape to the United States.…”

Section: Paperwork: Documents In Motionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The two kinds of belonging—kinship and citizenship—are thus tightly intertwined, 6 taking shape in the form of the birth certificate and, subsequently, the passport. Within the above-discussed literature on humanitarianism and refugees, the passport is always the mode through which legitimacy is sought; it thus signifies membership in a nation-state as certified by the state itself (Dewachi, 2015).…”

Section: Essential Documents In Transnational Surrogacymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Paperwork: Following the trail of (identity) papers in transnational commercial surrogacy

König

Majumdar

2022

International Journal of Comparative Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Transnational surrogacy—the carrying of a child by a woman in one country on behalf of persons in another—is strongly shaped by documents. Of these, identity documents are particularly crucial as they establish the belonging of a child born through such an arrangement both to its parents (birth certificate) and to a country (passport). However, the acquisition of these documents is subject to national laws that may contradict one another in transnational settings where citizens of more than one country are involved. As a result, in the last few years, there have been several cases of children stuck in legal limbo without clear parenthood and citizenship. Based on ethnographic research in India and Germany, we analyze how in such a transnational setting, documents and documentation become part of the making and unmaking of persons and belonging.

show abstract

Section: Paperwork: Documents In Motionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Essential Documents In Transnational Surrogacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Paperwork: Following the trail of (identity) papers in transnational commercial surrogacy

König

Majumdar

2022

International Journal of Comparative Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The presence of Syrians thus prompted the sharing of past experiences of violence that had rarely been narrated in the public sphere or framed as individual injuries and claims. Similarly, Dewachi (2015) argues that the story and injuries of Hussein, an Iraqi torture victim and asylum seeker in Lebanon, disturbed and agitated Lebanese people's own memories of and articulations of suffering from the Civil War. It was as if the Lebanese suddenly remembered the multiple layers of violence that inhabited their world and for which they had neither an official frame of recognition nor compensation.…”

Section: Sumud Economiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructures of Suffering: Trauma, Sumud and the Politics of Violence and Aid in Lebanon

Moghnieh

2021

MAT

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article traces the infrastructures of suffering under the governance of humanitarian psychiatry to explore how material conditions of war and aid have shaped the politics of trauma and sumud[steadfastness] in Lebanon. Based on 29 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken from 2011 to 2013, I look at the expert, economic, and techno-political assemblages of trauma and sumudduring the July War in 2006 and the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011. Mental health experts faced unexpected difficulties in diagnosing war trauma during the July War. This led political actors to claim that these difficulties reflected a general absence of suffering from war and a sign of Lebanese resilience, drawing on economies of sumudin postwar reconstruction. The Syrian refugee crisis however radically transformed the politics of suffering in Lebanon. A new political economy of trauma emerged where the Lebanese now competed with other aid communities to have their past suffering recognised as traumatic. Comparing the relations between violence, aid, and suffering in both instances serves to contextualise and historicise suffering beyond a particular discourse or event. It also serves to highlight the contingencies of suffering rather than its internal and psychic elements.

show abstract

“…There is less space for layered, cumulative injuries such as those brought on by eight years of war with Iran; the 1991 Gulf War, followed by years of severe sanctions that limited access to medicines, electricity, and basic commodities; the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime; and escalating violence and insecurity that marked the period of the US‐led invasion and occupation from 2003 to 2011. These multiple, traveling wounds move through time and space as well as across social worlds, as Omar Dewachi (2015) has described; some of these wounds might later become assets in the resettlement process, while others would remain invisible because they pointed to histories of violence and struggle that were illegible to the particular lenses of resettlement.…”

Section: Seeking Refuge Refusing Refugeenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

A transit state

El‐Shaarawi

2021

American Ethnologist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For Iraqi refugees in Cairo, third‐country resettlement offers a possible alternative to conditions of exile that they describe as “living in transit.” Yet resettlement—in which refugees are “selected and transferred” by a third country that offers them residence and, usually, citizenship—is available to less than 1 percent of refugees. A scholarly focus on already‐resettled refugees obscures the resettlement process's larger social and political effects in places where seeking resettlement may take years, shaping life in exile and simultaneously rendering mobility, and citizenship, both possible and unlikely. Ethnographically, this article follows refugees from the US‐led war in Iraq as they navigate the resettlement process, a process that places contradictory demands on them and evokes its own ambivalences. Centering Iraqis’ experiences of seeking resettlement troubles its designation as a “durable solution” and reveals ambivalence not only about bureaucratic processes but also about the very possibility of humanitarian solutions to displacement. [refugees, resettlement, humanitarianism, displacement, ambivalence, Iraq, Egypt]

show abstract

When wounds travel

Abstract: This article explores trauma as a form of 'social wound', entrenched in the intersections of local histories and social experiences of violence and displacement.

Cited by 30 publications

References 16 publications

Paperwork: Following the trail of (identity) papers in transnational commercial surrogacy

Paperwork: Following the trail of (identity) papers in transnational commercial surrogacy

Infrastructures of Suffering: Trauma, Sumud and the Politics of Violence and Aid in Lebanon

A transit state

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About