Friday, September 2, 2011

El Salvador's Post-Insurgent Lives

On August 31, I gave a research progress presentation at the IS Academy "Human Security in Fragile States", which had organized a research seminar to discuss progress on different associated research projects. My presentation focussed on understanding the long-term reintegration processes that former FMLN combatants dealt with in the postwar years.

IS Academy presentation 31-08-2011

Monday, May 30, 2011

La reinserción posguerra y el movimiento de veteranos del FMLN

En el marco del Foro 'Movimientos Sociales en El Salvador', celebrado en la Universidad de El Salvador (UES) del 25 al 28 de mayo del 2011, moderé un panel con representantes de distintos grupos del movimiento de veteranos del FMLN. También presenté un avance de mis resultados de investigación sobre la reinserción en El Salvador.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Compelling new book on Chalatenango's insurgent communities

Everyday Revolutionaries provides a longitudinal and rigorous analysis of the legacies of war in a community racked by political violence. By exploring political processes in one of El Salvador’s former war zones—a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation—Irina Carlota Silber offers a searing portrait of the entangled aftermaths of confrontation and displacement, aftermaths that have produced continued deception and marginalization.

Silber provides one of the first rubrics for understanding and contextualizing postwar disillusionment, drawing on her ethnographi
c fieldwork and research on immigration to the United States by former insurgents. With an eye for gendered experiences,  she unmasks how community members are asked, contradictorily and in different contexts, to relinquish their identities as “revolutionaries” and to develop a new sense of themselves as productive yet marginal postwar citizens via the same “participation” that fueled their revolutionary action. Beautifully written and offering rich stories of hope and despair, Everyday Revolutionaries contributes to important debates in public anthropology and the ethics of engaged research practices. 


For more info, click here

About the Author:IRINA CARLOTA (LOTTI) SILBER is an associate professor of anthropology in the department of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at City College of New York. 

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Revolution Revisited - Understanding Reintegration and Post-Insurgent Politics in El Salvador

In armed conflicts, State sovereignty becomes explicitly contested by emerging political actors. While competing to gain control over territory and inhabitants, armed groups create (rudimentary) systems of governance, which operate parallel to the State, itself often in the hands of a particular group or factions. This political arrangement, sometimes referred to as ‘rebel governance’, accommodates several functions, such as ensuring control over key resources for warfare and ideological showcasing. But what happens when the armed conflict ends by means of a negotiated peace settlement that demobilizes and reintegrates the armed groups into society?  A frequent assumption is that parallel sovereignty tends to disappear as the newly reformed State absorbs the former insurgents. A retrospect of the reintegration process of El Salvador’s FMLN insurgents, from the 1992 peace accords to present day, challenges this assumption. The social and political networks forged during the war did not simply reintegrate to ‘dissolve’ into larger society. Veterans, from rank-and-file to comandantes, sought to translate the social, cultural and symbolic capital acquired in the insurgency into strategies for economical survival and / or social ascendency. Electoral competition in a polarized and distrustful political environment allowed for the emergence of an intricate system of competing sovereignties, partially embedded in the State, partially functioning parallel to it. While competing for power with political contenders, the veterans’ create new forms of patronage and community control, framed within a shared revolutionary history. El Salvador’s case illustrates the need to revise the premises of post war reintegration as a bound and individualized process. The study proposes the inclusion of two new tools in the analysis, design and evaluation of reintegration programmes: 1) patron-client network theory and 2) a historicized understanding of the insurgents’ political and moral economy.